


A Life For A Life

by tielan



Series: Honour Bound [2]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Drama, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-21
Updated: 2011-06-25
Packaged: 2017-10-20 15:03:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/214021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some people are worth it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is the second in a series I wrote back in 2005 - so some of the people and situations won't be compliant with Stargate SG-1 canon. This is an Alternate Universe where we've diverged from canon, and both Daniel and Jonas are present. The timeframe is approximately Season Six.

Jonas would remember that moment for years afterwards, standing in the cool of the library with the scent of scrolls. That second was inscribed in his memories, indelible. The moment of mingled horror and terror and tension before dusty, papery scents were overcome with the wet smell of bronzy blood spilled, and peace and quiet was shattered in that place, never to return.

It marked a turning point in his view of events at the SGC - no less momentous than the day he came through the Stargate to Earth.

The day had begun in sunlight and chatter, emerging into Aegept - his first time here.

“Welcome to Aegept, Jonas,” Liz Vega smirked at him as she passed him, standing fascinated at the base of the Stargate stairs. “Enjoy the experience.”

The Stargate to Aegept overlooked the long gardens of the palace, flooded with the mid-afternoon sun. Workers were industriously gardening away, although Jonas saw the heads come up as the rest of his team and Daniel’s came down the stairs. Beyond the gardens loomed the palace, the style of the bright stone facings reminiscent of ancient Earth structures.

There was no hint of what lurked beneath the surface then, no sign that the Aegeptans were anything but cordially delighted to have not only SG-1, but SG-15 as well.

“I think you’ll like Aegept,” Daniel came up alongside him as the teams started tramping down the raked gravel path to the palace and the people who were approaching them in what looked vaguely like Grecian and Roman garb. “The marketplace is quite fascinating, they’re like the middle Eastern marketplaces of ancient times. They weren’t just places for bartering and exchanging, they were like...the local philosophy club, and the place where all major business transactions were agreed upon...”

“Daniel,” Colonel O’Neill called over his team-mate’s voice, “Can you leave the history lecture until later?”

“No-one said you had to listen.”

“No-one said you had to lecture, either,” the Colonel retorted. Still, if Jonas was any judge of character, the Colonel wasn’t irritated - just not in the mood to listen to Daniel talking about the background culture.

Jonas grinned and set himself to looking around the place.

Since Daniel had made that first overture of politeness, the two men had become friends, of a sort. They had similar interests, even if they came from different backgrounds. And Jonas was fascinated by everything Daniel had experienced in his life; from his childhood on archaeological digs to fostering out to the world of academics to the mission to Abydos and the year on that planet.

To someone brought up in the cities of Kelowna, the broad variety of Daniel’s life was amazing and enviable. To someone whose line of study was people and history, the small oddities of Kelownan life from American life were fascinating and attractive.

And they had a lot of things in common. Their perspective on the universe and how they fit into it. Their love of study and research and learning. And their ability to bounce ideas off others like rubber balls.

Colonel O’Neill refused to talk with the two of them. He complained that it was bad enough listening to Daniel and Major Carter and he wasn’t about to add Jonas to the list of people he didn’t understand. Colonel Adamson was just a little more understanding, although his eyes could glaze over in mere seconds once Jonas started bouncing ideas with another of his team-mates.

And here came their greeting party - a dozen men and women of different shapes, sizes, and years, their eyes intent, their smiles broad.

“Welcome! Welcome to Aegept! I am the Speaker of the Republic!” The Speaker was a portly man of middle years, effusive and enthusiastic. “Jaffa Teal’c! Colonel O’Neill! Major Carter! Dr. Jackson!” He spoke in sharp, excited bursts, as if his conversation were a bunch of exclamation marks grouped together and punctuated by words. “We are delighted to have you return to our planet! I am Speaker Sonan! And your friends! Colonel Adassen, is it?”

“Adamson,” the Colonel corrected him with an easy smile.

“So sorry! So sorry! Colonel Adamson. And your companions...I remember madam, and, yes, of course I remember sir...” The bright beady eyes rested on Jonas. “But you have someone new. The young man who came with you last time is not here...”

Was it just Jonas’ imagination or was there a slight tensing among the group? “The young man who arrived with us is dead,” the Colonel informed Speaker Sonan gravely. “Jonas Quinn here has joined Captain Vang, Lieutenant Vega, and myself on the team.”

Jonas relaxed a little. He knew - intellectually - that he’d been forgiven for his involvement in the cover-up regarding Lieutenant Rumlow’s death, but sometimes he wondered if he really was forgiven and accepted.

In the meantime, he paid his own penance for what had happened and tried to make amend. It was all he could do, and sometimes he felt it was little enough.

“Wonderful! Delighted to have you here! There shall be much rejoicing - the Heroes of Aegept!”

Daniel leaned over to Jonas, “You’re going to be _really_ tired of that phrase by the time we leave here. Trust me.”

Jonas grinned, involuntarily.

“So, why’d you call us here, anyway?” That was Colonel O’Neill, of course; direct and to the point, no beating about the bush.

The Speaker blinked. “A celebratory feast, of course!”

“You put on a feast for us last time,” the Colonel pointed out, inexorably. “Why the repeat?”

Jonas later wondered if they should have suspected something was strange at that point. At the time, he just thought that the Colonel was taking out what Daniel called ‘a mood’ on the hapless Aegeptans.

Another woman stepped smoothly into the breach, her voice rich and smooth as she explained, “We have made discoveries about our history that we wished for you to see. Your extensive knowledge of the world beyond the Stargates would assist us in greater understanding of them.”

“But that doesn’t require all of us to be here.” Colonel O’Neill was definitely edgy.

Beside Jonas, Daniel looked as thought he wanted to reach out and smack the Colonel. Major Carter’s expression was carefully neutral - as was Teal’c’s, and most of SG-15 were looking as though they’d rather be elsewhere. Only Colonel Adamson looked as though he was in any mood to understand the Colonel’s temper at this moment.

“Colonel O’Neill, we understand that your time is valuable. This will be only a short visit - this afternoon and this evening. We revere your people and your knowledge - the opportunity to bring you all back here could not be resisted.” The woman looked intently around the party. “We apologise for interrupting your day, Colonel, and hope that you will endure our zeal just for this day and evening.”

Colonel O’Neill was the nominal leader of the two teams, outranking Colonel Adamson in the final decisions regarding this mission. If he said, ‘Let’s pack it in,’ then they would pack it in. Although it was expected that he would consult the people under his care, his authority was given and their obedience was required. Jonas understood that much of the authority structures in the SGC.

The Colonel looked at Colonel Adamson, then to Major Carter and Teal’c. He glanced back at the Stargate, somewhat longingly, and shrugged. “I guess we can manage a day and an evening,” he said.

Seven people breathed slightly easier as the pronouncement left his lips, and Major Carter’s mouth twisted very faintly. Jonas wondered at that, but was given no chance to ask even if asking were polite.

Instead, the Speaker indicated the palace before them. “Please, come inside.”

*

Something wasn’t quite right.

He could feel it in his bones, as the old sayings went. It had caused his reluctance to stay on the planet, especially after they’d come up with such a flimsy explanation for the requirement of SG-1 and SG-15’s presence on the planet. Discoveries, his ass. They didn’t need two SG-teams for that. And as for celebrations... Well, they’d had their turn at celebrating the last time SG-1 turned up on the planet, what did they need another one for?

Jack sat at the table, absently listening to one of the Counsellors droning on about the importance of the SGC teams’ presences at this ceremony. He knew that he looked alert and aware of the speech being made, but in truth his mind had long ago started trying to catalogue what was bothering him about this place.

It was like a fingernail was being run down his mental blackboard, slowly raising his hackles.

This dissonance hadn’t been present the last time they were here. In spite of everything that had been going on in his personal life, the turmoil he’d felt at the revelation of Carter’s relationship with Adamson, there had been nothing like this odd sense that something was happening that Jack didn’t know about.

He glanced around the group, looking for any indications that someone else was feeling the same uneasiness, and caught Adamson’s eye.

Things had been uncomfortable between him and Adamson for a while now. They got on, there was no alpha-male posturing or anything stupid like that. Still, Jack felt uncomfortable in the knowledge that Adamson knew there was some kind of connection between him and Carter, and Adamson apparently felt uncomfortable knowing such a thing. Jack had seen the glances he got from time to time - usually when he dropped by Carter’s lab and Adamson was already there, or vice versa.

To say he wasn’t pleased at having Adamson put in his command for this mission was putting it lightly. Of course, Hammond knew of Jack’s discomfort with Adamson - George was far too astute a leader not to see what was plainly before his eyes. In the post-briefing talk with Jack, the General had subtly but firmly made it clear that he expected Jack to behave with absolute propriety, personal differences aside.

Jack wouldn’t have worked it any other way.

Of course, that didn’t mean he was particularly happy about this command. And maybe that had come through a little when the Aegeptans didn’t seem to have a very clear picture of why SG-1 and SG-15 had been called here.

Jack leaned back in his chair, and arched his brows a little in question to the Lieutenant Colonel, who gave him a half-smile and looked back at the speaking Councillor. No help there.

A quick glance at Teal’c, sitting beside him, showed that the big guy didn’t seem to be feeling anything unusual - although it was hard to tell with Teal’c.

Maybe it was just him.

But his instincts were rarely wrong.

His gaze flickered over the delegates at the table, noting the expressions on each, their intensity, the way they sat and the tension in their shoulders. His team - his team _s_ \- seemed at ease, even Jonas, who’d been looking decidedly uncomfortable as they were hailed as the ‘Heroes of Aegept’. Captain Vang was twiddling his thumbs, Daniel was writing notes and bobbing his head, his glasses had slid down to perch on the tip of his nose and he periodically pushed them up again. Lieutenant Vega had the glassy-eyed look of someone who was trying to listen and failing, but Carter looked like she was soaking up every word.

There was no reason for him to feel...cornered. They were sitting in a large, open room with multiple exits and a large balcony space with a garden and pond below. Four guards were stationed around the room, their clothing looked ceremonial in it’s rich colours and heavy style, but the weapons looked wicked. No match for P-90s, of course, but it wasn’t always about weapons against weapons.

Something was going on. The delegates looked as if they were waiting. Waiting for what?

Jack had no idea, and he hated it.

He’d have to make sure he talked to Teal’c, Carter, and Adamson about it. At least. He wasn’t too sure about Vang and Vega - he hadn’t had any occasion to work with them before, but Adamson would have an idea.

The Councillor took a deep breath and was about to launch into a description of the evening’s festivities. Jack decided enough was enough.

He coughed. Loudly. “Excuse me? Councillor? My people are only here for a couple hours so shouldn’t we be looking at the things you want us to look at? I mean, the evening’s festivities sound great - don’t get me wrong, I’m really looking forward to...quaffing the wine and eating until I can’t eat any more - all that stuff.” A few seats away, Daniel was attempting to clear his throat to interrupt. Jack didn’t give him a chance. “But you had some translations you wanted Daniel to do, and I think the Major here wanted to have a look at the hydraulics of that water fountain or something?” He turned to Carter and lifted an eyebrow. “Well, something anyway.”

The Councillors looked momentarily uncomfortable before the Speaker stood. “Of course, of course!” he said. “We are most sorry to have taken up your time...”

Jack held up his hands and the little man ceased burbling. “Just...what is it that you want from us?” He saw Daniel put his head in his hands and felt a quick flash of irritation. “Apart from us attending this celebration thingy tonight.”

Now it was the Speaker’s turn to be disconcerted and one of the women spoke from her chair. Her voice was rich and smooth and the expression on her face was serene as she looked at Jack. “The celebration is the primary reason for your presence here, however, as the Speaker said earlier, we have discovered previously-unknown facets of our culture and would appreciate Dr. Jackson’s input on them. If your people have other things that interest them, they may wish to be shown them now.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then we would appreciate the time to discuss the matter of trade negotiations for items that your people can provide.” A tiny smile appeared at the corner of her mouth, “Not exactly the most thrilling conversation for you, Colonel O’Neill, but consider it a necessary evil.”

He could almost hear the thoughts of his team as they watched his response to the offer. _His_ team, not SG-15. The sharp citrus of Daniel’s exasperation, the mellow honey of Carter’s amusement, the deep chocolate of Teal’c’s acceptance - flavours familiar to him as his own impatience with this kind of politicking. “That sounds okay to me.”

“If Dr. Jackson would like to go...?”

“Take Jonas with you,” Jack added.

“Lieutenant,” Adamson said, turning to Vega, “Why don’t you go with them?”

Good man. Sending Vega with them would mean that there was a military-trained person with Daniel and Jonas. Just in case his thumb-pricking was correct.

“Thanks, sir.” Vega was out of her seat faster than Jack could have imagined possible; evidently the Lieutenant had been as enamoured of the conversation as Jack.

At least she was getting out of it.

One of the delegates rose, a man whose hair was long and braided at the temples, “I will take you to the library to see the books most recently discovered...”

As they stood, Jack looked around the table, “Anyone else?”

“Actually, sir, Captain Vang and I have several questions to ask the philosophers and engineers of the culture,” Carter piped up.

He should have known.

Jack turned to the Aegeptan leaders. “Do you have someone around who can answer their questions? I should warn you that they’ll probably be fairly involved questions. Carter never asks the easy ones.” He shot her a grin and waited for the responding one, only too aware of her fiance sitting two seats away from him.

“You’re too kind, sir,” she responded, her tone of voice dry, but her smile warm.

One of the Counsellors had been leaning over to speak with another, and the woman resumed her position at the table as Carter spoke. “I believe that several of our engineers would welcome the chance to speak with you. We understand that you have some knowledge of the technology of the Goa’uld. While our people have been working to comprehend the possible uses of this technology in our new culture, there are some things we have not been able to determine. Much knowledge was lost with the overthrow of the Goa’uld and we would reclaim what we can.”

She glanced at Jack and gave a half-smile. “Sir?”

He waved at her to go. “Go on then. Captain, did you want to go too?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jack shrugged. “Okay. Try not to break anything.”

“Thank you for the vote of confidence, Colonel.” And with a quick smile at Teal’c and Adamson, Carter followed the delegates out, Captain Vang trotting after them with his odd, puppy-like gait.

Adamson shrugged, his mouth set in a rueful twist as they left and he moved over to sit on the other side of Teal’c. “Guess it’s just us to hammer out these trade agreements.”

“Heaven help the planet,” Jack muttered, then glanced up at Adamson, suddenly realising that it wasn’t just Jack’s own team here. “Sorry, Adamson.”

Adamson smiled, not taking offense to Jack’s assumption of his negotiating skills. “Exactly what things did you wish to trade, Councillor?”

“I understand that your people have a great desire for minerals and metals in their natural states? We have many sources for such things - more than our civilisation requires. Cronos frequently used them as goods for trading with other System Lords for the materials he needed but which his empire did not produce.”

They exchanged looks and went for the diplomatic option. “It sounds like a good idea,” Jack told them. “We’ll have your people talk to our people...”

The expressions of the councillors indicated quite clearly that ‘their people’ talking to ‘his people’ wasn’t going to do the trick.

Jack sighed and sat up. He really wanted to snoop around a little, work out what was nagging him about this place and these people. He didn’t want to talk.

Unfortunately, it seemed that their hosts did. And since the SGC personnel were guests here...

Maybe if he talked enough, he’d work out what was bothering him.

He glanced at Adamson, who shrugged a little and began asking questions about what the Aegepteans wanted of them.

And Jack’s neck prickled.

*

“So where were these found?” Jonas asked as Daniel peeled back the covers of the ancient texts, wondering at the fine sheets of parchment in their shrouds of dust. He squinted and angled his head to get the best light from the windows. The writing was unmistakeably Goa’uld, but crabbed and very old.

“They were found in some old storerooms of the palace,” said Lusia, the librarian who’d been assigned to them. Rather surprisingly - at least to Daniel - she was female. While the Greeks had been less rigidly patriarchal than other cultures, it was still highly unusual to find women working in positions of educational authority. From most of what SG-1 had seen through the years, patriarchies were much more common than matriarchies - although several Indian-based cultures had developed more matriarchally-oriented societies. “Since your last visit, we have been going through the Palace, searching out what Cronos hid from our people and bringing it out.” She beamed excitedly, “It is a great honour to be discovering our history here.”

Daniel gave her a quick smile and pushed his glasses back up his nose. “So, do you have any ideas on how old these texts are?”

“I have not learned the Goa’uld writings,” Lusia said apologetically. “Not well. But from what I heard tell, they dated back a thousand years to when Cronos first set this planet up as his headquarters.”

“They’re holding up well for a thousand years,” Daniel noted, impressed. Parchment and paper didn’t usually hold this well over time, rotting too swiftly in more tropical climates. The dry air of the surrounding savannah-like terrain had probably helped preserve the books. He turned the pages over, his eyes skimming over characters both familiar and unfamiliar.

On the other side of the table, Jonas was doing the same, but slower. The Kelownan’s perfect memory had come in very useful to him in earning him the respect of his team-mates - and others through the SGC. It had even come in useful to Daniel from time to time when he couldn’t remember where he’d seen something before.

Since the incident on the mothership and his conversation with Grant Adamson in the mess room of the submarine, Daniel had spent a bit of time getting to know Jonas. As it turned out, they got on quite well - rather in the manner that Daniel got along with Sam - her science balanced out against his own archaeology, frequently reaching the same conclusions through different disciplines.

Like Sam, Jonas was quite a calm personality. Not as controlled as Sam, but soothing.

On the other hand, Lieutenant Vega was wandering around whistling to herself. Daniel hadn’t worked much with Vega as yet. She was military and on a separate team, so their paths rarely crossed.

Accustomed to the comfortable silences of SG-1, the whistling was getting on Daniel’s nerves. After the third rendition of a tune he didn’t know and which seemed to change subtly each time, Daniel was rapidly descending into an irritated frame of mind. “Uh, Vega, do you mind...uh...not whistling?”

“Not whistling?”

“It’s annoying.” He tried to keep his voice level, and wasn’t sure if he succeeded - especially when Jonas looked up.

“Oh. Okay.” She wandered around the room, quite evidently bored, until Lusia began engaging her in conversation. Daniel quietly sighed and went back to browsing through the book.

He wasn’t quite sure what the book was about - it seemed to be a bunch of prophecies. Certainly the language was mystic. “‘ _We are the ones who walk unseen. We are unknown by man and god alike. Of man, yet with the very nature of the gods in us..._ ’” He read aloud, shaking his head.

“Sounds like something biblical,” Jonas commented, still turning through the pages. Then he frowned. “Did you say something about walking unseen?”

“Yes.”

“I just saw a note about walking unseen...” Jonas began flipping back through his book, “I thought it was ‘walking blindly’, but I think I could have the verb structure wrong. High Goa’uld runs differently how it’s read to how it’s written, doesn’t it?”

Daniel nodded, intrigued anew by the other man’s perfect memory. What Daniel had taken years to learn, Jonas had taken months to memorise. He felt rather envious of the ability - however random the gift.

An exclamation drew him back to the matter at hand. “Ah! Here it is:

 _Unseen we walk,_

 _A thousand years we live,_

 _And someday we shall reclaim our destiny._ ”

Daniel frowned. _That sounds familiar..._

“That’s inscribed on the water-fountain down in the marketplace.” He remembered a sunny day in the city and a talk by Jack and Teal’c about war. The inscription seemed odd at the time, but Daniel hadn’t given too much time to pondering over the meaning of the words - there were so many other things at which to look and the inscription was too cryptic to puzzle over.

“Did Cronos have it put there?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, absently browsing through the text in his book. “It’s not what I’d expect from Cronos.”

“It _is_ a little cryptic for the Goa’uld.” Another page was gently turned over. “But the ‘walking unseen’ thing is odd. I know that Nirrti possesses stealth technology that enables her to become invisible, but I was under the impression that this was a recent development - the last few years, not thousands of years ago...”

A thought teased at the edges of Daniel’s consciousness, the briefest glimpse of something that had registered with his unconscious mind, but eluded his conscious thought process. “Walking unseen...” he muttered to himself. “Of gods and men and monsters...”

“What’s the ‘ _of man but in very nature gods_ ,’ thing?” Jonas asked. “The gods are the Goa’uld, but what about the ‘ _of man_ ’ bit?”

It was flirting around the edges of his perception, like a flamenco dancer who danced in the shadows out of the spotlight, her long, flounced skirts teasing the white circle of vision. “Of man and gods...” Daniel muttered. “Walking unseen...”

For some reason, his mind suddenly threw up Robert Rothman at him.

It hit him like the force of a punch and he could barely get the word out of his mouth.

“Goa’uld.”

Both Jonas and Vega looked at him, startled by the non-sequitur. Lusia seemed to have vanished. Daniel tried to explain as understanding poured into his brain like water into a glass.

“On P3X-888, we discovered Goa’uld that didn’t possess any naquadah in their blood. Although we speculated why, we never actually found out why it was so. But the Goa’uld there couldn’t be detected by people with naquadah in their bloodstream like Sam or Teal’c. They were ‘invisible’ to the Goa’uld. And humans never know if a Goa’uld is occupying someone right next to them until the Goa’uld gives itself away.” Daniel had first-hand experience of that, Sarah’s beautiful, austere face rising up before his eyes.

“‘ _Unknown by man and god alike_ ,’” Jonas said softly. “‘ _Of man, but with the very nature of gods in us_...’ So there are non-naquadah Goa’uld on the planet?”

“I think so.” He frowned, trying to see if anything had seemed out of place. “Vega, do you remember anything odd from your last visit?”

“‘Odd’ as in...?”

Daniel threw his hands up, “I don’t know. Sideways glances, stares, any resentment from the leaders or the people who were around you. Odd behaviour, something that confused you, however briefly...”

She thought it over, worrying at her lower lip. “Not really. I was mostly enjoying the experience. I did think that they were very eager to meet us - almost too eager. I just figured it was the whole ‘heroes of Aegept’ and hero-worship thing coming into play.”

“They were certainly eager enough to see us this morning,” Jonas mused. “The Speaker was very talkative...”

“But the rest were very quiet.” Daniel said.

“Observing us. For weaknesses.” Vega suddenly changed. The transformation was subtle, but startling - from a mildly-bored woman to an alert, suspicious soldier.

“You think so?”

“They were very insistant that we be here - as many of us as possible. But they haven’t explained why.”

“For the celebration,” Jonas said.

“That’s what they said,” Vega replied, her cynicism obvious. “I didn’t see a lot of preparation happening for a celebration.”

Now that he thought about it, Daniel hadn’t either. “The last time we were here, six months ago, there were preparations going on everywhere. You couldn’t walk through the halls without falling over someone trying to get something done for the celebration.”

“Maybe they’ve toned it down.”

Daniel looked at the possibility then rejected it, thinking of the ‘triumphal entry’ into the palace. “Somehow, I don’t think so.”

They all looked at each other, thinking the same thoughts. _We make very good hostages - or prizes of war._

Then something rippled across Vega’s face and Daniel took a second too long to identify it. And when he did her gun was already out and pointed at him. “Shit. For all I know, you guys could be...”

“No! No, wait!” Jonas waved his hands at her. “We haven’t been separated from each other since we came through the Stargate - if we had been then you’d have cause for suspicion. And it wouldn’t do them any good for us to be speculating about whether the Goa’uld are here. However...” He trailed off.

“However, the separation of us from the others would have given them the chance to implant the others with symbiotes,” Daniel finished grimly. “Or us...”

They glanced around, suddenly aware of their prone position, but the library appeared deserted. “So what do we do now?” Jonas asked, lowering his voice.

“We can’t call the others, because they might have already been compromised,” Vega said.

“And we don’t know who from the Aegeptans is Goa’uld either.” Daniel removed his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. “But we can’t leave the others behind, compromised or not...”

“The SGC needs to be told.” Jonas spoke with sudden resolve. “Over and above everything else.” He caught the glance Daniel gave him and met it with equanimity. “I know that your concern is for your friends, Daniel, but the SGC is a point of Stargate contact for not only this world but many others. If it - and Earth - fell into the control of the Goa’uld - even the non-naquadah Goa’uld...”

“The non-naquadah Goa’uld aren’t any better than the naquadah Goa’uld,” Daniel said, remembering his team’s personal report of Rothman’s death. “The drive for power and dominion still runs in them.”

“The SGC needs to know,” Vega said, instantly. “That’s our first priority - above everything else, even rescuing our team-mates.”

Daniel shook his head. There was no way he was leaving this planet without his friends. It would be a betrayal of the worst kind.

“Dr. Jackson, someone needs to take the news back to the SGC - _two_ people need to take it back so they can vouch for each other. That’ll be you and Jonas. The others will need to be told - assuming they don’t already know because of the snake in their heads.”

“I’m not leaving without the others.” Daniel had always been accused of being stubborn - from his parents’ amused teasing of a five-year-old boy, to the grumbles of his foster-parents, to the head shaking of his old professor and academic peers, to Jack’s annoyance with him. He’d earned the right to be stubborn. “You and Jonas take the news back to the SGC...”

“No can do, Dr. Jackson,” Vega shook her head and her dark ponytail swung from side to side. “I’m the military personnel here, I’m better equipped to extract the others.”

“No.”

“Dammit, Jackson...”

“It’s not practical, Daniel.”

Daniel glared at Jonas, too angry at the prospect of leaving his team behind to think about what he was saying. “Was it practical to lie about what happened to Rumlow, then?”

He knew the words were wrong the instant they left his mouth, grasping futilely after what could not be taken back.

Jonas stiffened, and the distance between them suddenly widened to a chasm.

 _Tactful, Dr. Jackson, real tactful._

“Jesus, Jackson,” Vega snapped, something like revulsion crossing her face. “You sure know how to aim for the gut.” Anything else she was about to say was forestalled by Jonas’ interjection.

“This is no longer a diplomatic situation, Daniel.” He spoke quietly, but the hurt from Daniel’s accusation was evident in his face. His voice was a little quicker and softer - almost breathless, as if the slam had winded him - but he kept to the point. “You and me, we’re not the military cogs in this machine. That doesn’t mean we don’t do what’s needed, but it means leaving the job to the people who can do it better. Lieutenant Vega is better suited to locating the others and getting them out. And,” Jonas continued doggedly, “If it comes down to the Goa’uld taking us, they already have all the military minds of the team in one place. One more won’t make a difference. But you have a lot more than military knowledge in you - knowledge that the Goa’uld would love to get their hands on.”

There were no accusation in Jonas’ words or voice, merely a calm focus on the most important point at this moment: getting the news back to the SGC. And Daniel hated him for that. So rational. So calculated. So calm and together.

Or maybe the other man was just blocking it out, concentrating on a single objective and going for it.

No different to what Daniel had done at other times.

 _Sometimes, Daniel, you can be a selfish bastard._ The words were Jack’s - the only one of Daniel’s team who was blunt enough to say such a thing. _And, before you say it; I know, it takes one to know one._

Something in him wanted to whine that this wasn’t selfishness - this was selflessness. But even he couldn’t level it that way. Sure, he would be saving a handful of people, but the potential cost to Earth if the Goa’uld got hold of one more hostage...

And then Daniel realised that the hostage didn’t have to be him. It could just as well be Jonas. Jonas with his perfect memory and his extensive knowledge - not only about Earth and the Goa’uld, but also about the naquadria technology the SGC had been working on with his help. Daniel wasn’t the only valuable one.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll head back to the SGC.” His lips tightened, “If nothing else we can get reinforcements.”

Vega nodded. “Good thinking, Dr. Jackson.” That was probably as close to a ‘thanks’ as he was going to get from the Lieutenant, and Daniel gave a brief, tight smile. “What percentage of the population do you think is...infected?”

“It wouldn’t be many,” Jonas murmured.

“Generally, the Goa’uld don’t like too many other Goa’uld around - too many rivals,” Daniel said, thinking of the System Lords’ feast on the space station. “I don’t know exactly who, but I’d guess that most of our hosts are. They might have one or two among the guards...” His brain suddenly started to take in the enormity of getting out of the palace and back to the Stargate. “This is going to be tricky.”

“Tricky or not, you’d better hurry,” Vega said. “The faster you get to the gate and warn Earth, the less time the rest of us will have to be nervous.”

“You’re coming with us - at least as far as the corridor,” Jonas told her. “If we stick together, there’s a better chance of us all staying human.”

“Are you leaving us?” The voice spoke up at Daniel’s elbow, startling them all.

“Uh, yes,” Jonas said, unable to hide his nervousness as he looked from Daniel to Vega to Lusia. “It seems...”

“It seems that you have discovered the truth,” said the librarian in a totally different voice. Out of the shadows glided two more people, both holding urns before them.

Daniel swallowed hard.

Then gaped as blood flowered down Lusia’s front.

Jonas ducked as Vega swung her P-90 around and took the two other Goa’uld in the throat with a single, perfect shot each. As if in slow motion, Daniel watched the Goa’uld hosts tumble down, limp marionettes, and he reached for Jonas, even as the bases of the urns hit the stone floor and shattered the clay, bursting water from their porcelain confinement.

Beneath his hands, the weave of the cloth was rough and unyielding as he yanked Jonas away from the squealing symbiotes writhing about in the shards of porcelain. _We were to be Goa’uld hosts...like Ska’ara. Like Sha’re._ Daniel felt a sudden need to be violently sick. He wasn’t given the opportunity as Vega took Jonas’ other arm and hauled him up, mercilessly.

“That game’s up, anyway,” she said with cool detachment, although she looked waxen pale. The instant Jonas had his feet under him, Vega headed for the exit, automatically assuming that the other two would follow behind her. “You’re going back to the SGC this instant. They need to be warned about it. Go through to the SGC, shut the iris and lock out our codes. Send a team to Cimmeria, we’ll convene there - Thor’s Hammer will remove any symbiotes we possess.”

She was walking so fast, they could barely keep up with her, and her voice was incisive and calm. Daniel looked at Jonas, who met his gaze for an instant and shrugged. Either he was used to Vega’s determination, or he didn’t have any ideas and was willing to go with her plan.

Then Vega stopped walking, just shy of the end of the aisle. She turned to Daniel and waved her finger under his nose, “Dr. Jackson, if I see your face after we part company, I swear by all that I hold holy, I will shoot you through the head for endangering Earth and being a stubborn ass.”

Daniel had a moment to feel outrage before the Lieutenant turned on her heel and walked on, ignoring his, “Now, wait a minute...” Beside him, Jonas gave him a single, unfathomable glance and followed her.

It wasn’t like Daniel was really being given an option to stay behind.

God, he hoped that the others were okay. Teal’c would be trustworthy at least - he wasn’t a viable host as long as he had the primta - but the rest of the group were vulnerable.

And he had to trust that Vega could get them free.

“Are you sure you can do it by yourself?” He asked as they reached the end of the aisle of books and scrolls.

She glanced back at him. “I won’t be doing it by myself. Once I get to the others, I’ll have them.”

“And if they’re already Goa’uld?”

“Then it’ll be too late for all of us.” Another glance over her shoulder. “But it won’t be too late for Earth if you and Jonas get through to the SGC to warn them.” She looked at Jonas and nodded ever so slightly - an exchange that intrigued Daniel.

He didn’t have time to follow up on it, however, since Jonas headed for the door, pushing it open a crack, and pulling out his zat.

Daniel pulled out his gun as Jonas peered into the marble-paved corridor outside.

Vega plucked at his sleeve, “If you get yourselves killed, Dr. Jackson, Earth is left defenceless. _You_ may not have any of your loved ones still on Earth, but some of us do.” Her eyes bored into him. “Don’t you _dare_ fail.”

There was a passion there, an anger and a fear that surprised him with its intensity. As she let go of his sleeve, Daniel realised that, hard as it was for him to leave her to get the others, it was as hard - if not harder - for her to leave him to get the job done.

It struck him that saving the planet was a fairly impersonal proposition when the people you cared about most were saving it right along with you.

He took a deep breath and nodded. “If you get them, don’t take them home. Once we’re through, we’ll disable your codes. Go to Cimmeria and we’ll pick you up there.”

“If we’re not at Cimmeria, then tell Hammond to order the SGC to shoot us on sight,” Vega said with quiet intensity.

As Vega would do her best to save the people Daniel most cared about, so Daniel would do the same for her. They neither of them liked it, but they knew their responsibility.

Jonas was glancing back at them, curious about their exchange. Daniel indicated the corridor. “Are we clear?”

“We’re clear.” The pale eyes travelled to Vega, “Good luck.”

She nodded, taking a deep breath. “You, too.”

And then Jonas opened the door and they were out into the corridor.

They took the first few corridors without trouble. They got some wide-eyed glances from a couple of people who looked like servants, and whom Daniel hoped _were_ actually servants. They had no way of telling who was friend and who was foe, so, technically, everyone had to be foe.

But Daniel wasn’t ready to start a bloodbath in the palace. Not yet.

Jonas glanced quizzically at him as the men went past, their heads carefully lowered in a gesture of respect and subservience towards the guests. The question was plain enough. _Goa’uld?_ Daniel shook his head, although it was nothing more than a guess. It was most likely that there would only be a handful of Goa’uld on the planet, and they would be in the highest positions - the Councillors of the Republic

“Do you know where we’re going?” Daniel asked when Jonas took the lead without asking for his opinion.

“I think so.”

“You _think_ so?”

“We can’t go back the way we came,” Jonas said, moving with swift, sure steps. “But I remember seeing some stairs that came around the side of the palace, and judging by the architecture of the corridors we were led along before...” They turned into a porticoed colonnade and Jonas crossed over to the balcony and peered over the side as Daniel stepped out of the way of a servant who blinked at them curiously, then ducked her head.

So far so good.

The only question was whether the servant would go off and report it to one of her masters.

“The Stargate’s in the garden below,” Jonas pointed in the relevant direction, and Daniel took one step towards the balcony to see for himself.

He heard the sizzle of a staff weapon discharging its load a mere moment before he felt the burning, searing heat that fried the nerve endings in his left arm. A hiss of pain escaped his lips, but even as he sank down to the floor, he had his gun out in his good hand. It was the effort of a moment to sight along the barrel. Two bullets later, the man who’d shot him was on the floor in a pool of blood - and his arm was in raw agony.

Jonas was already under his good arm, helping him up. “Good shot.” The blue-grey gaze flickered over to the curling, bleeding edges of the raw, red burn and he grimaced. “Are you...”

“I’m okay,” Daniel answered the question. He ignored the fiery pain pulsing through his shoulder and arm in time with his heartbeat. There were more important things than stopping to bandage his arm. The shots in the corridors would carry loudly and within a few seconds this place would be crawling with servants - and with the servants would come their masters. “How far is it to the Stargate?”

“About three hundred yards from the palace.” Jonas helped him to his feet, grimacing as Daniel gasped. “Sorry.”

Daniel dug his fingers into the other man’s shoulders, “Don’t apologise. We have to keep moving. Which way out?”

There were voices coming along the corridor - they were out of time. Jonas grabbed Daniel’s sleeve and ran for it. Their shod feet pounded along the tiled balcony. They passed the dead servant.  They skidded around the next corner, nearly bumping into two more servants. Daniel reached for his gun, but Jonas had already pulled him past and zatted both Aegeptans with a single shot.

They went down like felled logs, limbs twitching as the excess electricity overloaded their synapses.

At the next alcove, they jogged down a set of stairs, taking the treads two at a time. Every landing jostled Daniel’s still-smoking shoulder, and jarred him to his teeth - but every second that passed just increased the odds of their being caught - of Earth never getting the message that the Goa’uld were in control of Aegept.

At the bottom, they found themselves in a large, open corridor that seemed to run all the way along this edge of the gardens. The floor ran in tiers down to a walkway in the gardens, forming steps which the two men climbed down as swiftly as possible.

Above them, someone gave a great shout, and they glanced at each other and ran.

A little voice in Daniel’s mind told him that running was merely drawing attention to themselves as they pelted along the rows of hedges. However, his instincts were stronger, and adrenaline flooded his system, powering his muscles.

Every step jarred his nerves, yet he kept moving. Every twist and turn he made yanked at the rapidly-drying blood encrusting the raw edges of his jacket, yet he ran on.

At least the air was cold.

If only the damn thing didn’t hurt so much at the contact.

Daniel gritted his teeth and kept running.

The first blast of retaliation incinerated an unfortunate bush behind him. The second went over his shoulder and set the dry grass beyond their path alight.

 _If we wanted proof that they don’t really think of us as the heroes of Aegept, we have it,_ he thought as a third bolt set fire to a nearby bush. _Now if only they can keep missing us..._

He had no idea how Jack and the others would get back through the Stargate with the Aegeptans on the alert.

A part of him _really_ wanted to go back.

 _Don’t you_ dare _fail._ Vega’s ferocity back at the library blew that idea away like smoke in a gale.

They were nearly at the Stargate now - shielded from the Palace view by the corner of a hedge. Their main problem was that the last fifty yards were open to the Palace - they would be a big fat target while one of them dialled the gate.

Jonas glanced back. “How’s the arm?”

“If I die, it won’t be too soon,” Daniel said with grim humour. “If we get through to the SGC, Janet can give me morphine for it.”

“ _When_ we get through to the SGC,” Jonas corrected him. “I’ll dial the DHD - can you send the GDO code?”

Daniel slipped the GDO out of his pocket, wincing as the movement of the shirt scraped the raw flesh of his wound. “Yes.” The sooner they got through the gate...

The hedge they were cowering behind jerked and began smoking. They looked at each other, and Jonas grimaced. “Wish me luck.”

And then he was gone, running full-pelt across the gravel path leading down to the Stargate.

Daniel followed him around to the edge of the hedge, and began looking for targets. From this angle, he couldn’t see the people with the staff weapons, but he could see the bewildered expressions of the people working in the gardens. People close enough to see them and who they were.

Daniel got an idea.

He stepped out onto the gravel and jogged across, waving at the people gardening over at the other side of the Stargate. “Hey!”

Jonas glanced up as he continued to hit the buttons. He was standing at the upper end of the DHD so he could see the palace and the shots being fired at him. It made dialling a little slower and harder, but that was definitely better than a staff weapon blast in the back.

A couple of the workers looked up, surprised, and one came over to the hedge in front of Daniel.

“Hey,” Daniel said in the common Aegeptan dialect, looking at the nearest one, while still trying to keep an eye on the firing from the palace. “ _Do you know who I am?_ ”

The man blinked. “ _You are one of the heroes of Aegept_.” He indicated Daniel’s shoulder and a pitchfork suddenly came up. “ _Who has dared to hurt you?_ ”

He recoiled at the sight of the muddy tines - an unexpected and not very pleasant weapon. “Uhh...” Then Daniel suddenly realised that this could help the others still inside the palace. “ _Look, some of your people are...evil. They’re like Cronos again - Goa’uld. They’ve crept back into your land and are intending to rule it, just like Cronos ruled you._ ”

“ _Goa’uld_?” Okay, not the sharpest tool in the box, but he was all Daniel had to work with.

“Daniel!” Jonas yelled over the ‘whoosh’ of the Stargate’s opening.

“ _Look, my friends are still in the palace. Can you gather your fellow...uh...gardeners and help my friends get to the Chappa’ai_?”

“ _To the Chappa’ai..._ ” Daniel could swear he could see the mental cogs turning behind the man’s eyes. “ _Help them to the Chappa’ai.”_

“ _The people who are Goa’uld will be trying to stop them. You have to help them_.”

The man frowned, even as Jonas jogged up to them. “Daniel?”

“ _How will we recognise them_?” The man seemed like he was genuinely trying to understand.

“ _You’ll know our friends - they’re dressed like us. Just help them through the Chappa’ai. That’s all we ask. As a favour. For the_ ,” Daniel internally winced but kept going, “ _Heroes of Aegept_.”

That seemed to do the trick, the man straightened, his shoulders going back. “ _For the Heroes of Aegept_.”

 _Oh, God._ Still, help was help. Daniel gripped the man’s shoulder. “Takhi’im.”

“What was that about?” Jonas asked as the gardener stumped off.

Daniel input the GDO code and sent it through the open wormhole. “Getting backup for the guys,” he responded as a bunch of staff weapon blasts landed just short of the gate. “Oh damn.”

Their enemies were back and firing.

“Just run for the gate, I guess,” Jonas said. “And dodge enough to avoid getting hit.” He glanced at Daniel’s shoulder. “Again.”

“Okay, let’s...” Daniel stopped short as there were shouts and cries from behind. The gardener and several of his companions were running towards the palace, gardening implements in hand.

“Good pep talk,” Jonas said lightly. “Let’s go.”

And they ran out of their cover behind the hedge, panting as they sprinted and jinked. They narrowly missed being hit by the barrage of blasts that landed around their feet as they got to the steps leading up to the platform. Several blasts vanished into the event horizon. Several more singed their clothing.

Then they were at the Stargate, and leaped through the freezing cold wormhole to the SGC beyond.

*

The negotiations of which the Aegeptan councillors had spoken made little sense to Teal’c.

As a warrior, Teal’c was not fully conversant with the intricacies of diplomacy and diplomatic relations. What little he had seen of diplomacy was learned from his team-mates, all of whom could be most _un_ diplomatic at times.

Still, it seemed that the Aegeptan councillors were...stalling.

Stalling for what?

O’Neill shifted in his chair, uncomfortable with all this diplomatic talk. From experience, Teal’c knew his friend would rather not have been in conference regarding trade agreements. Such reluctance came partly out of boredom, but also due to O’Neill’s awareness that he was not a diplomat. Teal’c knew that his friend considered it ‘a crying shame’ that Earth might have to be represented by someone who ‘really has no idea about this kinda stuff.’

Still, their ‘diplomats’ - Jonas Quinn, and, to a lesser extent, Daniel Jackson - were not here.

And so the Speaker droned on about trade agreements and what might be acceptable to the _Tau’ri_ in such agreements...

Teal’c blinked. ‘The Tau’ri’ was not a term that the Aegeptans commonly used to refer to them until now. It was a Goa’uld term - not a human one.

Unusual.

“Excuse me,” O’Neill interrupted. “ _Tau’ri_?”

The blue eyes of the Speaker were astonished as he stared at them. Were there the faintest glimmerings of fear in his expression? “What?”

“You just called us the _Tau’ri_.” O’Neill said, in a tone of voice that was neutral - for him.

“I...I did not.”

“You did,” Teal’c stated, watching the expressions of the Councillors behind the Speaker.

He saw the jerk of the head by the woman, and turned, his zat already in hand and tracking the guards behind them. Two were taken out easily, fumbling to get their weapons into action. Behind him, he could hear the chatter of weapons fire, even as the third guard managed a shot - thankfully from a zat and not a staff weapon - that took O’Neill in the back. Teal’c shot him down as the fourth collapsed in a shower of sparks.

It was over in less than thirty seconds.

Teal’c glanced around, surveying the room for any further threats before seeing to his friend. The two guards on the floor weren’t moving - the zat blast had knocked them unconscious. Adamson was holding a gun to the Speaker’s throat and the other Councillors appeared to be down.

O’Neill was rousing, clenching and unclenching his muscles in spasms intended to regain control of his body. Teal’c hooked an arm under O’Neill’s shoulders and hauled him up. “O’Neill, are you well?”

“Apart...from being really... _really_ mad...that our latest allies have turned out to be nasty... I’m fine.” O’Neill clenched his jaw and his body again. “Just peachy.” He turned his head, “Where’s Adamson...?”

“Colonel?” Adamson said, standing back. “We have a problem.”

They looked, and found the weapon being held to the Speaker’s throat was not Colonel Adamson’s but Lieutenant Vega’s.

If Teal’c was surprised to see Lieutenant Vega holding her gun to the throat of the Speaker. O’Neill was furious.

“Vega, where the hell are Daniel and Jonas?”

“Hopefully back through the Stargate by now, sir.” She jerked the P-90 she held under the Speaker’s chin a little, causing him to lift his head higher. “The Aegeptans are Goa’uld - non-naquadah, which is why Major Carter and Teal’c can’t sense them. They’ve been hiding out for millenia, waiting for the chance to get back into the Goa’uld power structure.” Her expression was tight. “We were to be their hostages.”

“Hostages?”

“That’s our guess, sir.”

“‘Our’ meaning Daniel’s?”

“Both Dr. Jackson and Jonas, actually,” Vega responded. “I sent them through to Earth, they should be disabling our codes even now.

O’Neill swiftly reassessed the situation. “How are we to know you’re not one of them, Lieutenant?”

She shrugged. “You don’t. But until I start shooting you in the back, you won’t know either.”

“So wait, how do you know _we’re_ not Goa’uld?” Colonel Adamson asked.

She indicated Teal’c. “Teal’c’s symbiote prevents a Goa’uld taking him as host, sir. And I doubt he’d stand quietly by while you took a snake in the head.”

The two Colonels looked at each other as if to say, ‘She has a point.’

Then O’Neill’s face snapped shut like a steel trap. “Carter.”

Colonel Adamson’s expression froze and he spun on his heel and strode to the Speaker, twisting a hand in the collar of his robes. “Where are they?” he demanded with sudden ferocity. “Where did your people take them?”

“I...I don’t know... We are not...”

“I saw two of your kind,” Lieutenant Vega said, biting off each word sharply. “They had urns with Goa’uld in them - we were to be hosts...”

“You must be mistaken...”

Abruptly, the Speaker’s expression changed to agonised as the sharp retort of a gunshot rang out in the Chamber.

Blood dripped wetly on the floor as Adamson brought the gun up to the Speaker’s face. “You want to play games with me, Speaker? Go right ahead. Colonel O’Neill might play civilised. I won’t.”

His ferocity, unexpected to his colleagues, evidently held a ring of truth to the Speaker. He dropped all pretence of being human as his eyes flashed gold and the harmonic overtones of a Goa’uld resounded with ugly reality. “We have waited a thousand years to reclaim our destiny...”

Teal’c could never hear that voice without some fear. He had been servant to the Goa’uld for too long to completely ignore the tone of it, although he fought against the instincts to follow it.

“If you’re dead, you’re not going to reclaim any destiny,” Colonel Adamson snapped and the gun came up to point at the Goa’uld’s shoulder. “And if you don’t have a shoulder, you’ll have a little trouble using a ribbon device. _Where_ did your people take...”

“Adamson,” O’Neill warned quietly.

“He knows where Sam is.”

“I know. And we all want to know where Carter and...”  He broke off as weapons fire chattered outside.

O’Neill strode to the window, pointing at the two guards who were trying to rise. “Teal’c, zat ‘em again, please.” And without a backwards glance he took himself to the balcony and, cautiously, stepped outside.

“Sounds like gunfire,” Adamson said, his gun still pointed at the Goa’uld. “It’s gotta be Sam.”

“Could be Jonas and Dr. Jackson,” Lieutenant Vega pointed out. “They’re supposed to be on their way to the Stargate...”

“If Daniel Jackson and Jonas Quinn were ordered to make it to the Stargate and go through, then it is most likely that they are the ones firing. Major Carter and Captain Vang...”

Their radios spit and crackled. “Colonel?”

Both O’Neill and Colonel Adamson answered their radios at the same instant.

“Carter?”

“Sam, are you okay?”

There was a slightly startled pause, before Major Carter continued. “Sir, we’ve got gunfire happening outside.”

“Carter, we’ve got a situation,” O’Neill said. “If anyone approaches you...” He glanced at Lieutenant Vega, “Especially with big ceremonial jars...”

In the background there was the sound of gunfire and swearing and then a faint squealing sound and more swearing.

“Sam!” A pause and more gunfire.

They waited, tensely.

Nothing.

A zat whined. Vega yelped. Gunfire chattered.

Teal’c sighted and fired, sighted and fired, until the vaulted room echoed. Until the only person in his sights was O’Neill, speaking into his radio as he strode over to where Adamson and Vega had gone down. “Carter, report.” His eyes met Teal’c’s and he nodded his head. Both the Colonel and the Lieutenant were okay - for the moment.

“Uh...sir...” The voice that came over the radio was Captain Vang’s shaking tones. “Th...they’re Goa’uld!”

The moment froze. Then O’Neill depressed the button on his radio and spoke incisively. “Carter’s a Goa’uld?” No answer came. “Vang? Carter?”

“I’m fine, sir.” The new voice that crackled across the airwaves was quite audibly Major Carter’s. “We’re fine.” Teal’c felt relief flood him. A little of the tension left O’Neill’s shoulders. “But we’ve just disabled several locals who were carrying big jars with Goa’uld symbiotes in them.”

O’Neill bent down. “Roger that, Carter. Some of the locals, possibly the high-ups, are Goa’uld - the non-naquadah kind...”

“Which is why Teal’c and I couldn’t sense them.” Major Carter’s voice held understanding.

“Yup. We’re blowing this joint, meet up at the gate. Try to keep casualties to a minimum. The Aegeptans aren’t our enemies, just the... Shit!” There was a rapid-fire burst as O’Neill shot at something on the floor.

Teal’c began to stride over, but whirled as one of the Aegeptans on the floor groaned. To be certain that the man would not rise again, he zatted the man once more and turned back. “O’Neill?”

“Sir?” Major Carter’s voice was nearly a bark.

“I’m fine,” Teal’c heard by voice and radio. “We just had a...small situation with a snake trying to wriggle out and infest Adamson. He’s fine.”

“Apart from the huge headache,” came the dry response. “This floor is hard.”

“You’ll survive,” O’Neill leaned down to help Adamson up. “Okay, Carter, get the hell out of wherever you are and to the Stargate!”

“Getting the hell out as per orders, sir.” There was grim humour in Major Carter’s voice as her radio clicked off, and O’Neill’s expression showed a mirroring amusement at her tone of voice as he hauled Lieutenant Vega off the floor.

“Roger that, Carter. See you at the Stargate. O’Neill out.” O’Neill let the button on the radio go and glanced around the room.

Colonel Adamson was helping Vega up. “Which way out, Vega?”

Vega dusted herself off. “I guess the same way we came in, sir.”

“The Goa’uld are now aware that we know of their subterfuge.”

“My thoughts exactly,” O’Neill said. “I have another idea.” He detoured around the table to collect the carrypacks they had brought to Aegept and pulled out a coil of rope. “Got your climbing gear, folks?”

*

She and Teal’c stood guard on the ground as Colonel O’Neill and Colonel Adamson rappelled down. Adrenaline hummed through Liz’s veins as she carefully surveyed the terrain and stretched her hearing for any possible sounds of pursuit.

The Colonels were faster than she and Teal’c had been, their experience coming into play. Then they were on the ground and unhooking themselves, all focus.

“Fastest way to the Stargate?”

“We shall be in the line of fire, O’Neill.”

Colonel O’Neill was quick with the response. “Fastest way to the Stargate that doesn’t involve us making targets of ourselves?”

“Along the side, hugging to the gardens and that hedge,” Colonel Adamson responded as he flipped the safety catch off his weapon. Liz watched him with a careful eye - he’d already surprised her once today by shooting the Speaker. Her CO was usually a calm, thoughtful man, not given to rash actions.

Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea for both SG-1 and SG-15 to be sent on this visit after all.

“Right. Teal’c, you’re point. I’m tail. We make for the Stargate and we hold it for Carter and Vang, okay?” An explosion rocked the ground, stopping O’Neill short. Liz crouched down, then winced as dust trickled down past her face.

She narrowed her eyes as much as possible to limit the fine powder blowing into her vision and quickly moved out from under the overhanging stone balcony. The explosion had evidently weakened the structure of the palace enough to make standing underneath the balcony a bad idea.

Her team-mates thought the same thing - they swiftly moved down the stairs and into the garden area, gathering among a small copse of trees.

“That has to be Carter,” Colonel O’Neill said with no small amount of satisfaction. “Give the Major some C4 and she’s a happy soldier.”

Teal’c had taken a few steps away, out of the copse, and was looking towards the Stargate. “Many Aegeptans are running back to the palace.”

“Good distraction.”

“Indeed.”

“Then we’re moving. Lead us out, Teal’c.” O’Neill gave orders in the tone of someone who expected them obeyed. Liz found herself wondering how well Dr. Jackson usually followed those orders. Not very well, she imagined - the man had been all set to rebel and go fetch his team-mates himself.

She hoped he hadn’t doubled back. Jonas had sense to see that the priority was to warn Earth - Liz just hoped that they’d made it through. She tucked away the thought of her husband and son, back on Earth with no idea of what she did in Cheyenne Mountain. When she’d told Dr. Jackson she’d shoot him right there if he refused to go back to Earth, she hadn’t been kidding.

Yes, everyone he really cared about was on this planet - but too many people that Liz cared for were back on Earth. And she was military. She could trust herself to be of use - Dr. Jackson might have proven himself to Colonel O’Neill and Major Carter, but Liz believed in self-reliance. If you wanted the job done right, you did it yourself.

That included saving the world.

She followed the tall Jaffa as he hugged the hedge, keeping her senses stretched for any signs that might mean they’d been spotted. There were none.

They moved briskly rather than stealthily, trusting in the noise of people running by on the other side of the hedge to hide their footsteps. Besides, Liz realised, they wouldn’t be able to stay hidden forever. Sooner or later, someone would spot them, and then...

A badly-aimed staff blast alerted them to their enemies, and Liz spun towards the blast, her P-90 already out and peppering the bushes with gunshot.

“And we’re running!” O’Neill yelled from behind, his own gun out and firing. “Vega, when we get there you’re dialling. Try not to get hit in the back while doing so!”

“Yes, sir!” She made sure her retort had some bite in it and saw him give her a stern glance for flippancy.

 _Try not to get hit in the back, my ass,_ she thought with a measure of annoyance. Dr. Jackson was welcome to him!

They were about one hundred yards from the Stargate and the coast was mostly clear - the guys were opening fire on anything that was shooting at them. Not quite the most pacifistic of actions, but they didn’t really have time to stop and ask which side the Aegeptans were on.

At thirty yards, a group came out of nowhere and got them at close quarters.

At this range, their attackers were using the staff weapons as blunt instruments rather than trying to aim and fire. Liz took down two and used the butt of her gun as a club to swing the third out of the way before he could blast a hole in Teal’c’s back. Then she used the muzzle to get his eye on the way back and blew his neck off as she tracked a fourth and took him down.

“Aim for the neck!” she screeched as she trained her weapon on Colonel Adamson’s opponent. If there were Goa’uld, then they’d be wrapped around the spinal cord, and when the host died, they might jump. She had no intention of getting a Goa’uld in the head, even if they were heading for Cimmeria first. Did Thor’s Hammer even remove non-naquadah Goa’uld?

A smack with the butt of a weapon jarred her vision and took her down into the dust. She fired up at her attacker, blindly aiming for the chest and lungs, and rolled out of the way of the falling body.

Something squealed and tried to wriggle out of the man’s mouth and Liz panicked. She kicked her legs up and over her head, performing a backwards somersault so she was on her knees. Her finger clutched at the trigger, and she fired without actually looking at the Goa’uld writhing out of the dead man’s mouth.

Colonel Adamson was fighting hand-to-hand against two men. Liz shot the nearest one, first in the back, then in the throat when he stiffened in pain. She climbed to her feet, aiming at a man who was about to shoot Colonel O’Neill from behind - and watched in surprise as the man’s head exploded in a shower of red.

The gunfire came from over in the gardens - and it was with some relief that she heard O’Neill yell, “Took your sweet time about getting here!”

If an answer came back from Major Carter, Liz never heard it. She was too busy fighting off the next wave of Aegeptans. They came in waves, and it was impossible to tell who was fighting for them and who against. All you could do was wait for them to come at you and fight.

As she peppered a few more shots into some of the approaching attackers, she heard the start of a dialling sequence begin on the Stargate and turned. Major Carter had taken advantage of a break in the fighting to head for the DHD and start dialling.

“Cimmeria!” Liz screamed, hoping that the Major could hear her. “We’re going to Cimmeria!”

Without missing a beat, Major Carter slammed her hand down on the red activation panel to cut the dialling sequence.

The blow caught Liz in the ribs. Pain blossomed, but she didn’t think she had any broken ribs - yet. In retaliation, she slammed the muzzle of her P-90 into the jaw of her assailant and swung back, firing once.  Dark eyes widened in shock as the bullet pierced oesophagus and spinal cord simultaneously and she added another one to the heart for good measure.

The Major was dialling Cimmeria, and Liz glanced around, trying to ascertain her own danger and keep an eye on the surrounds.

A staff blast sizzled past her ear and she smelled burnt hair. The guard was easily identified - the fighters armed with staff weapons had to stand further back to sight their targets properly. She shot him down even as he raised the weapon to aim at Teal’c’s unprotected back.

Adrian yelped to her right. She turned, but Colonel Adamson had already dealt with Adrian’s opponent through the expedient measures of a P-90 swung at the back of the head.

A triumphant cry came from the Major - the wormhole was open. “Gate’s open! Let’s go!”

Liz noticed Major Carter didn’t take her own advice. The other woman pulled her weapon around and went back into the fighting.

They had to go through soon, Liz saw as a guard grabbed at Adrian, taking him down to the ground. There were only a handful of Aegeptans still fighting them now. The SGC were still outnumbered, but it was a manageable outnumbering - just.

Adrian’s assailant got in a couple of solid punches before Liz reached him and used her P-90 as a club, swinging him off her team-mate with brutal inelegance. She hauled him up and indicated the open Stargate. “Go.” Breathless and winded, he just nodded and ran, diving through the wormhole.

Colonel Adamson was heading for the gate. He caught Liz’s eye and she waved him through, turning away. A moment later, she heard the ‘plop’ of his departure.

Major Carter finished off her last opponent even as there was a yelp from Colonel O’Neill. Liz turned.

He’d been engaged by two attackers. One of them had just gotten a blow in under his defences. He crumpled, even as Teal’c finished off the other attacker.

“There are more coming!” Major Carter said, running to help Teal’c. Liz waved her on - she was closer and could get to the Colonel faster.

“GO!”

At least the Major had the common sense to see that others could do the job better. She made a beeline for the Stargate and ran up the stairs and into the event horizon.

Liz shot the guard in the back as Teal’c hauled Colonel O’Neill up, over his shoulder. He made his way through the piled bodies of SG-1’s opponents. Liz covered his back, her eyes constantly moving from bushes to gardens to path.

There were more guards coming at them. Liz laid down more coverfire to scatter them, aware that her ammo had to be running out.

Fifteen yards.

Ten yards.

Five yards.

The staff blast came out of seemingly nowhere, earthing itself in Teal’c’s shoulder. He stumbled and the Colonel nearly got his head bashed in as Teal’c lost his grip on the prone body. Liz grabbed Teal’c’s uninjured arm, trying to haul him up. “Keep moving, dammit!” Survival first. She would worry about her temerity at ordering around a hundred-year-old warrior later.

Teal’c grunted. He clambered to his feet. Slowly, painfully, he dragged himself to the event horizon, even as several more staff weapon blasts converged on their position.

Liz spattered bullets in a 270-degree arc from one edge of the Stargate to the next. It was a vain attempt at cover fire - her P-90 sputtered and died.

Behind her, the event horizon plopped. They were through.

Liz immediately leapt up the stairs and plunged into the Stargate. The transition from one Stargate to another was still dizzying. After three years at the SGC, she knew the technical description of what happened as you went through the Stargate. All she knew was that it was better - or worse - than any rollercoaster ride she’d ever experienced.

It was quiet on the other side. Quiet and cold.

The frosty stairs abranded her skin as her forward momentum rolled her down the stairs, and she landed on her back with an, “Ooof!” Cold seeped in through her fatigue’s jacket immediately, and she watched as a stray bolt from a staffweapon soared through the open Stargate and into the sky.

She followed the trajectory of the bolt, and her eye landed on the huge pillar. The Hammer of Thor.

The gold metal of the Hammer glowed briefly, and the blue light washed over her. It permeated through every pore of her being, searching for the enemy it had been created to destroy.

Under its piercing touch, she found herself frozen, like a creature in car headlights. There was a brief moment of itchiness, but the light vanished as swiftly as it had begun. Liz shivered and nearly fell as she stumbled down the stairs. One glance showed that the event horizon had shut down. Another showed Adrian and Major Carter checking over Colonel O’Neill and Teal’c.

There was no panic, just Major Carter’s voice, asking calm questions of Teal’c as she attended to Colonel O’Neill. They didn’t need her just now - Adrian had glanced her way and she nodded at him as she flopped onto her back and just lay there. The cold didn’t bother her - she was tired, and the adrenaline in her system was fast fading.

Then a thought struck her. It brought her to her feet, every muscle aching from the cold and the draining adrenaline.

She glanced around. The paved area around the Stargate had frosted edges to it and the fields beyond were covered with patchy snow beneath a cold, grey sky. The fields were mostly empty, although distant figures could be seen moving behind wagons and carts.

The whole effect was kind of lethargic, and not a little ominous.

Cimmeria was a refuge. But it didn’t _feel_ very comforting.

“Is Colonel O’Neill okay?” Liz heard Adrian ask.

“He was hit with the flat end of a staff weapon.” Teal’c said, his stolid tones laced with an undernote of pain.

“Might be concussion,” Major Carter said, “We’ll need something to support his head and neck before we take him back to Earth...”

“I told Daniel and Jonas to come through here,” Liz said as she turned, surveying the planet. “We can’t dial Earth - they don’t know that we’re not under Goa’uld control. So we come here, they join us and take us back.”

Liz paused. She turned around again and frowned.

 _But he went..._

“Where’s Colonel Adamson?” Her voice sounded shrill, even to her own ears.

Major Carter’s head jerked up, “He didn’t come through...?”

“I don’t know.” Liz looked to Adrian.

“He d...didn’t.” In nervousness, Adrian reverted to his habitual stutter. His eyes flickered from Liz’s face to Major Carter’s. “After I g...got through a man arrived, but the H...Hammer took him. I watched the G...Gate. There w...was nobody else until Major C...Carter arrived...”

He hadn’t made it.

Major Carter’s eyes met Liz’s gaze. “We have to go back!”

It would be suicide to go back. They’d be walking into a situation blind - with no idea of what was happening on the other side of the Stargate.

Liz didn’t say it, though - she didn’t need to. The Major knew the impossibility of it even as the words left her mouth. She paused, tension all through the line of her back and shoulders, one hand resting on the Colonel’s shoulder.

And, as if on cue, Colonel O’Neill groaned, shifting uncomfortably on the cold ground.

The question of Colonel Adamson’s situation became moot. He was where he was - probably still on Aegept, either dead or unconscious. The matter of the immediate care of their team-mates was priority.

Still...

Liz tapped Adrian on the shoulder and indicated that she was going to find some of the locals and get what help they could for Colonel O’Neill.

Colonel Adamson was beyond their help now.


	2. Chapter 2

She woke up alone.

She’d woken up alone nearly every morning for the last seven years. For a while, she’d thought she’d always be sleeping alone. After all, relationships with the people closest to her - the people who understood the importance of her work - weren’t possible, and relationships with those who didn’t know what she did for a living were impossible. Then, she’d started dating Grant and started thinking that maybe she wouldn’t have to wake up alone ever again.

Aegept had changed all that.

Her last sight of Grant had been him heading for the Stargate. Then Colonel O’Neill yelped from behind her, and she and Teal’c swung to see if their team-mate needed help. Behind them, they heard the gurgle of the Stargate as someone entered the event horizon, and Sam thought nothing more of it.

Until she looked around Cimmeria and didn’t see him there.

Her first instincts had been to march over to the DHD and dial Aegept to go and get him back.

That thought died before it even finished. If he was on Aegept, he was in the possession of the Goa’uld. Alive or dead, it didn’t matter. Going back to Aegept would be a suicide mission.

General Hammond had ruled it a suicide mission and Aegept had been locked out of the dialling computers.

That was a month ago.

There were other things happening in the SGC to the people around her. Sam paid attention and did her job and responded where necessary. But another part of her was waiting for him to walk back through the Stargate with the slightly worried look he got when he had something on his mind.

Sam knew this expectancy for what it was - simple human denial. In the absence of a body, of the concrete knowledge of where he was, he was simply...removed. Not gone from her life, but ghostly. Present and discarnate; waiting around every corner but never seen, at work when she was home, at home when she was at work.

While a part of her moved on with the blunt necessity of the military, a part of her held on with the fierce grip of humanity's need for memory.

Her grip was slipping.

Maybe it was just that she’d been alone for so long that the habits and patterns of her life as a single were rapidly reasserting themselves.

There was nothing she could do about Grant’s absence, but that didn’t stop the sense of emptiness in her life. He’d been there, and now he wasn’t.

Increasing daylight pushed back the shadows on the ceiling, chasing them out of existance until the night returned.

Sam sighed and rolled over in the bed. She didn’t want to get up today - a feeling that had hit her increasingly often in the last four weeks since they returned from Cimmeria in the company of SG-8.

It would be tempting to call in sick - in six years, she’d rarely called in sick, too often being found in her lab when her team-mates or Janet considered that she wasn’t fit for duty. But calling in sick today wouldn’t help - they’d just reschedule her for the appointment tomorrow. Or the day after that. Or the day after that.

It was little comfort that the rest of her team and SG-15 were undergoing counselling as well - sometimes all together, mostly individually. Daniel and Jonas had gotten out of it pretty early. MacKenzie ruled that the trauma was considerably less since their section of the mission was successfully accomplished - get off the planet and warn the SGC, then go to Cimmeria to pick up their team-mates.

Sam, as the fianceé of the missing man, was coming under the most rigorous scrutiny.

She was tired of it. Tired of the ‘how do you feel about it’, and the ‘do you think you could have done anything’ questions that assailed her when she sat down with Dr. MacKenzie. Tired of the whispers and the wonders, tired of the people who trod on eggshells around her, expecting her to break down and cry or expecting her to lash out in anger. The guys knew enough about her to act normally, but even their small gestures of concern could be stifling.

They meant well, she knew. She just wasn’t sure how much more of it she could take.

Slowly, she climbed out of the bed and wandered into the shower.

They just needed to get back into the rhythm of the SGC. Once they were back on the active roster for Stargating teams, she’d deal. She’d miss him at night and in the morning, but she’d deal. She always dealt with this kind of stuff. After Jolinar, after Edora, after the za’tarc machine; after the entity, after the Aschenn, after Aegept. She dealt.

Could she deal with the guilt of not having looked back to see that he made it through the wormhole?

Could she deal with the ache within her that was neither sad that he was gone, nor glad that he was gone?

Could she deal with the loss of someone who’d been so closely intertwined with her life in the last year?

She would have to. Life would not stop for her and she would not stop for this grief. She could not. To do so would be a betrayal of everything she had been taught - of everything she had worked towards these last few years.

It was simple and yet it was also complex.

Too complex for a mere soldier scientist to plumb.

Water spray cascaded down over her face and shoulders, masking the tears she hid from the world and herself. The water was hot and what her body needed, but it didn’t ease the icy chill of loneliness within her soul.

Whatever conflicting emotions carried on within her, the plain, simple truth of the matter was that she missed him.

She missed Grant.

But beneath everything she felt or felt she should feel was a hard kernel of relief, shameful though it might be.

At least Colonel O’Neill made it through.

*

The glass was set down in front of Sam as Jack climbed back into his seat. “Eat up, Carter. Can’t have you wasting away on us.”

Daniel snorted without looking up from his notes, “Sam’s got more sense than to go in for some fandango diet.” He slanted a faint smile at her. “Besides, she’s fine as she is.”

The pleasure in her expression was tinged with wry amusement - and the faint gleam of feminine pleasure at the admiration of a man, even one she considered just a friend. “Very good, Daniel. Lots of brownie points.”

It pleased him to see that she was starting to come out of the shell she’d retreated into upon their return from Aegept. While his pride and a now-instinctive dislike of the psychologist wished to believe that it was just the passage of time, another part of him knew that the counselling sessions they’d all undergone with Dr. McKenzie had helped her ‘necessary grieving process’ along.

Even if she was the only one of the two teams still not cleared for offworld travel after a month.

“And what do the brownie points get me?” He countered.

Her smile broadened. “Maybe the significance of those equations you found in that scroll from P1W-292?”

Daniel jerked up in his seat, nearly upsetting his drink. Only the opportune intervention of his team-mate stopped the table from flooding with Mountain Dew. Teal’c reached out and plucked the wobbling bottle from where it threatened to overbalance. “You worked them out?”

“Math and science translate better between languages than words, Daniel, you know that.” Sam watched Teal’c solemnly put the lid on the bottle before she looked back at him.

Daniel made a face at her. “I knew I should have specialised in the hard sciences at college. The easy route and all...” Sam smiled, her expression showing that she was quite aware of his attempt to prod her into a defence reaction about her discipline, and that he wouldn’t be getting any reaction from her.

“Oh come on, Daniel,” Jack interrupted, “You never took an easy route in your life, especially not if there was a harder one to follow.” When Daniel glared at him, Jack elaborated. “Well, for a start: aliens and archaeology?”

He _would_ bring that up. Of course, Daniel had been right in the end - a fact that didn’t require a reminder.

“And Egyptology, while popular, isn’t exactly easy at the Doctorate level,” Sam added. “Yes, I worked out those equations for you. If you drop by after lunch, I’ll explain them to you. They’re not exactly lunchtime conversation.”

“Almost nothing we talk about here is lunchtime conversation,” Jack said, a note of dryness in his tone. “Between the two of you,” he indicated their half of the table with his spoon, “it’s more suited to a lecture room than a lunchroom. Teal’c and I have to make up by discussing sports and other mindless things.”

Daniel rolled his eyes. “Anyone who thinks that you two are mindless needs their head examined.”

“You sometimes...”

“I do not!” He had never thought anything like that at all. He might want to hit the man over the head with a clue-by-four on occasion, but he did try to avoid underestimating him. “I sometimes think you’re deliberately misunderstanding, but I never think you’re mindless. Stubborn and pigheaded, on the other hand...”

“Right back at‘cha, Daniel.”

“...but never brainless.”

“So kind.” Sarcasm dripped from Jack’s voice like ice-cream from a cone.

Beside him, Sam was regarding them with undisguised affection and exasperation for their argument. Daniel opened his mouth to ask about the equations she’d translated and was interrupted.

“SG-1 and SG-15 to report to the briefing room immediately. Repeat. SG-1 and SG-15 to report to the briefing room immediately.” Heads rose at the PA announcement, then swivelled to where SG-1 was sitting at their table.

“And I was only halfway through my Jello!” Jack complained without any particular animosity. “Do you think Hammond would let me take it with me?”

Daniel rolled his eyes and stood up, not bothering to answer his friend.

Up in the briefing room, General Hammond didn’t beat around the bush.

“We’ve received a lead from the Tok’ra about a human prisoner being held by one of the minor Goa’uld Lords. They don’t have an operative in that court so they can’t tell us the details of exactly who. All they know is that he’s bound for Anubis one way or the other.”

 _A human prisoner headed for Anubis..._

Most ordinary humans weren’t of much interest to the Goa’uld - only the rebellious _Tau’ri_. And while there were several SGC personnel who were MIA, there was only one recently missing member of the SGC.

“Colonel Adamson?” Jonas was the one to voice what they were all thinking, but that nobody had the courage to say.

Daniel carefully didn’t look at Jonas. He hadn’t really said anything to the other man since his outburst on the planet - an outburst he’d come to regret.

“That’s what we’re hoping. The Tok’ra have managed to send an agent to infiltrate the court and discover the identity of the captive, however, the agent is on a tight time frame. She was supposed to be headed out to another system, but has agreed to stop by at the court in her guise of a messenger between System Lords and their vassals. She’ll be on this planet for only a couple of hours, during which she’ll be able to debrief you about the prisoner and give us any information we need to proceed - if proceeding is possible.”

Daniel risked a glance at Sam. Her chin trembled a little, and there was a sudden rigidity in her posture. But that was all. He shot her the faintest of smiles and caught the ghost of a grateful smile in return. It vanished with General Hammond’s next words.

“Since Major Carter hasn’t yet been cleared for off-world activity, I’ve decided to second Captain Vang and Lieutenant Vega to SG-1 for this mission.” Hammond indicated Teal’c. “If Teal’c is willing to remain behind this time...?”

Teal’c didn’t have a problem with that at all. “I am willing, General Hammond.”

It was fairly obvious from Sam’s expression that she did have a problem with staying behind. Daniel felt regret and satisfaction both. He wished that Sam was able to come with them, but until McKenzie cleared her, she was confined to base. In the meantime, Teal’c would stay to keep an eye on Sam, so she didn’t feel completely left out.

“Jonas will continue working with SG-11 on the Katari negotiations during this time. That’ll make the meeting party Colonel O’Neill, Dr. Jackson, Captain Vang, and Lieutenant Vega. You’ll ship out in two hours to the address the Tok’ra have provided...”

“Any chance of a trap, sir?”

“Leave that job up to those of us with more people under our command, Colonel. The address has been provided from a trustworthy source - we can choose to act on it, or to lose the opportunity. We’re acting. You ship out in two hours. Dismissed.”

As the others shuffled out, Daniel paused by Sam, deciding that he had time to cut it close. Jack would probably skin him for being late, but he really needed to find out how things were going with Sam - especially after this news.

So far, she’d taken it all very well. Too well.

Daniel tended to speak his mind. It was what had caused the rift between him and Jonas in the first place. Sam tended to keep her thoughts to herself until her opinion was asked. She tended to be reserved and self-controlled - partly because that was her personality type and upbringing, but partly also because of her training as a soldier.

“Well, we have a bit of time,” he said as she stood up. “Why don’t you show me those equations you were looking at?”

Beyond her, Jack and Teal’c were hovering in the corridor. Daniel glanced at them and hoped they’d take the hint that he was going to monopolise her time until they left to meet with the Tok’ra.

Sam seemed startled by his request. “Well, you have to go in a couple of hours...”

“I can be ready in thirty minutes,” he said and watched the smile grow on her face.

“Which just means you’ll be fifteen minutes late.”

“Jack can wait for me. He usually does.” Daniel knew he sounded careless and smiled at the admonishing look she gave him. Sam was military down to her bones - tardiness was practically a sin.

Sam shook her head, smiling at his cavalier attitude. “Okay. I guess it won’t take too long to show them to you.”

In the silence as they made their way back to her lab, Daniel pondered how to bring the matter up. As it turned out, he didn’t have to. Sam brought up a topic that swept away all thought of her emotional state and focused on his instead.

“What did you say to Jonas on Aegept?”

It was a mildly curious question, no condemnation in it, but Daniel still felt defensive “Nothing much.”

She regarded him levelly, “It must have been _something_. The two of you have been tiptoeing around it since we came back.”

“And here I thought we’d been so subtle about it,” he tried joking about it. It didn’t work.

“Just because we didn’t bring it up doesn’t mean we don’t notice these things, Daniel.” She sat down behind her computer, her heels up on the heel-rest, her hands in her lap. “You and Jonas seemed to be getting along fine before Aegept. And since then, the pair of you haven’t been seen in each other’s company for more than five minutes. What did you say?”

“What makes you think that I was the one to say anything?”

Sam fixed him with a ‘look’. “He’s the diplomat, Daniel. And you’re the one to hold grudges.” Her gaze was direct and unapologetic. “I know you. You speak first and think later - more than even Colonel O’Neill does. And you were Rumlow’s friend.”

Daniel looked at her, sitting still and expectant on the other side of the desk. Sometimes, in the consideration of Sam as a soldier and a scientist, he forgot that she was also a woman, and a fairly perceptive one when she chose to be. Just because she was brilliant at math and science was no reason for her not to sense and address issues she felt might be of concern to them as a team.

He could tell her it was none of her business. Put the spotlight back on her and ignore what she was trying to do. He could.

“I asked him if it was practical to lie about Tim’s death.” That was the bald version, and he turned away, not wanting an audience he could see as he confessed his sins. “It was on Aegept. We were in the library, we’d just worked out that the Goa’uld were in control, we were looking for a way out. I wanted to go after you guys, Vega wanted me to come back here to get the news back to the SGC. Jonas said it wasn’t practical... I got angry.” He’d let his temper control his tongue - never a wise thing - and said what couldn’t be unsaid.

He set his palms against the cool bench-top edge, waiting for her response, her condemnation - anything.

“Did you mean what you said?”

Had he meant it? Yes. At the time. But there was a difference between thinking something and saying it. Sometimes a very big difference. And Daniel had crossed that line and could not go back.

“Yes. And no.”

“Do you want to fix it?” The question was curious rather than cold, reflective rather than judgmental.

Daniel turned, looking at her and frowning. “What do you mean, ‘Do I want to fix it’? Of course I do!”

“There isn’t necessarily an ‘of course’ about it,” Sam replied. Her hands rested on the table, and the diamond Grant had given her twinkled in the low-level light of the SGC. “You might just want to avoid Jonas in future.”

For the first time since he’d come back from Aegept, Daniel actually thought the matter over rather than just reacting to it.

He’d liked Jonas. If they’d met under any other circumstances, he got the feeling they would have been friends. They shared the same cultural curiosity about civilisations and cultures, although Daniel was more attuned to the ancient knowledge of archaeology while Jonas’ curiosity lay towards the study of the culture using modern Earth society as a reference. They’d disagreed about matters of archaeology and diplomacy before and never thought twice about it.

But they’d been fairly careful not to mention Tim after that first time Daniel went to see Jonas, holding out the proverbial olive branch.

In hindsight, Daniel realised that he hadn’t really let Tim’s death pass. It had scabbed over but not healed. In a way, Aegept had ripped the scab off - and Daniel had realised that it still hurt. It still rankled that the worst reception Jonas received from the SGC was some coldness shortly after his arrival.

 _But he worked to make himself useful,_ he reminded himself. _He gave us all the knowledge about the naquadriah testing, and anything he remembered from his study of the Goa’uld ruins on Kelowna. He came up with the solution for the Stargate that Anubis locked. Sam said he just kept suggesting until one of them took._

In the end, for Daniel, it didn’t matter how useful Jonas had made himself. The SGC and the military personnel might think in terms of utilitarian practicality but Daniel was not military.

Jonas had been indirectly responsible for Tim’s death according to the reports.

According to the reports.

Daniel paused in his thoughts. _I never asked him what did happen with Tim,_ he realised with a gut-sinking feeling. _I never asked him why he decided to take the part of his government and say that Tim had tried to sabotage the research. I never tried to get any background or information about it. I just made a judgement._

 _Very open-minded, Daniel._

“Do you mind if I ask a question?” Sam’s voice broke in to his reflection and he started. Lost in his musings, he’d forgotten she was even there.

He shrugged, still struggling with his own actions and reactions. Daniel knew you couldn’t choose what happened to you, but you could choose how you were going to respond to it. His father had taught him that and it had served him well through the years of mockery by his academic peers. When had he forgotten that old, old lesson?

“Have you forgiven Teal’c for Sha’re?”

It was a simple enough question. No tricky bits. Not even anything he had to think about. “Yes. But that’s different?”

“How?”

He turned to glare at her. “Have you been taking lessons from McKenzie?”

Sam didn’t take the insult as it had been thrown. “I’ve been learning while he’s been headshrinking me, yes.” She gave a deprecating shrug and her mouth twisted a little. “However, unlike him, I have a personal stake in your well-being.”

“I had to forgive Teal’c.” Even several years later, Daniel remembered the time when he’d been unable to look at Teal’c without thinking of Sha’re and what had happened to her; her possession by Ammonet, her death. That time, it had been Jack who gave him the requisite kick in the pants to get over it.

“Did you want to?”

“He asked for forgiveness.”

“Did Jonas?”

“I had to work with him on SG-1.”

Sam was silent.

He’d loved Sha’re more than he’d loved anyone in his life since his parents’ death. She’d been the practical one amidst his flights of fancy. She’d been the supporting one when he flung himself, headstrong, into a translation or a theory. She’d been the woman who’d laughed at him when everyone else held him in far too much awe for his comfort. She’d been the woman at night who slid against him, giggling at his shyness in bed.

He’d forgiven Teal’c for Sha’re’s death and he’d loved his wife with more passion than he’d spent on anyone before or since.

Why couldn’t he forgive Jonas for Tim’s death?

“You know, I actually came to ask if you were okay with McKenzie’s headshrinking about Grant,” Daniel said, in a feeble attempt at humour.

“I know,” she said, shifting on the chair with a rustle of fabric. “And I asked about Jonas first, Daniel.”

“I think I may need more time to think this through,” he said.

“You’ve had over a month,” she said quietly. “Maybe you should start acting.”

He bristled in spite of the knowledge that she meant well. “You’re not putting any arguments forward for him?”

“I don’t need to.”

She let the silence sit for maybe a minute, unmarked by any comments or any activity on her part. Then she spoke again. “I’m tired of people asking if I’m okay about Grant.”

Daniel turned, relieved that the spotlight was no longer on him. She’d given him stuff to think about, but he didn’t have to think about it right now. Maybe while they were waiting for the Tok’ra to turn up.

“We’re just trying to care,” he offered.

“I know,” she said as she pulled a file from her inbox tray. “Which is why I haven’t yet lost my temper at you.” There was a quiet weariness about her - a weariness Daniel remembered only too well from the days after Tim’s death. “Look, I’m...coping.” Her mouth turned up a little at one corner, giving her the ghost of a wry smile. “And this mission might be a step towards finding him.”

“You don’t have to do this alone, you know, Sam.”

The smile vanished, leaving behind a tired woman. Yet, even in her weariness there was a sombre beauty about her. “I know, Daniel.”

He had enough sensitivity to realise she wasn’t going to talk about it now. And he’d done more or less what he’d come to do. Rather less than more, but Sam was an expert at evading personal questions. “You know we care about you, don’t you?”

The bubble of laughter that emerged from her was more of a huff than a laugh, but her delight and pleasure was obvious. “Yes, Daniel. I do. And the...care is reciprocal.”

He nodded, satisfied. “Just so you know.”

“I know.” She waved the folder at him before the moment could get maudlin. “You wanted to know about those equations?”

Daniel did. They spent the remaining hour going over the translations and the equations with no more words about Jonas Quinn or Grant Adamson.

*

Jack glanced up from his cup of coffee. She was struggling with the cookie wrapping, trying to get the plastic open. For a woman who could fix just about any electronic gizmo made, she was having a surprising amount of trouble.

After a few minutes of watching, Jack could take no more. “Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “I’m not all that hungry anyway.” And he wasn’t. He hadn’t come to her place to eat her food, he’d come to see how she was doing.

She shot him a brief, wry glance and discarded the cookie on the bench, still unopened.

Since their return, Jack had been closeted with General Hammond and the Tok’ra Vaisha, trying to determine how reliable the data from the Tok’ra really was. He’d been too busy to spare time to come out and see her.

A four-hour mission turned into a week-long run from the Goa’uld when the Tok’ra’s cover was blown. Vaisha turned up to meet SG-1, but brought a whole flotilla of _hat’ak_ on her tail. There was time for her to ring up SG-1 onto her _tel’tak_ , and then they were off.

The nearest planet with a Stargate was five days flight away when your teltak was at full power. Vaisha’s teltak wasn’t. And the Tok’ra herself flew her craft like a drunk in a Tomcat, except that the teltak had more gees. It just didn’t have enough gees to get them to the nearest Stargate-capable planet in anything less than a week.

By the time SG-1 returned with Vaisha, Carter, Teal’c, and Jonas had cleaned up an NID operation out in Steveston, nearly getting snaked in the process. Carter had been sent home from the infirmary to recuperate, having been cleared to leave the infirmary but not being permitted to drive or work.

Jack knew that to fuss over her would be a mistake. Not that he was the fussing type, either. But he knew this woman, and he knew how much she hated fussing. So he wouldn’t ask about Steveston. Not yet, anyway.

She’d almost died.

She’d been so close to becoming a host to another snake and only the providence of Richard Fleming had stopped it. Jack sent grateful thoughts towards the ghost of the dead Zetatron scientist. If not for his serum, nobody would have discovered Carter was a Goa’uld until too late.

“So what brings you to my abode, Colonel?” Carter asked lightly as she took up her cup of coffee and sipped it slowly.

Jack shrugged, unwilling to admit that he’d wanted more than the assurances of Janet, Daniel, Teal’c, Jonas, and General Hammond that Carter was fine. He’d wanted to see her with his own eyes and assure himself that she was okay.

“Has McKenzie cleared you for offworld yet?” He asked, not quite changing the subject, but not answering her question either. It was an innocuous query.

If she was surprised by the apparent non-sequitur of his conversation, she answered it nevertheless. “Not yet. I see him on Thursday.”

“Joy.”

Her mouth quirked.

If she knew why he was here, she hadn’t called him on it - yet. So, with tacit permission given, Jack studied her as closely as he dared.

She seemed fragile, her skin taking on a translucent hue of weariness. It had all been too much, too close together. Yet, in the midst of her exhaustion, the near-indestructible core of her still shone through. She was lit up from within, illuminated by that spark of Sam Carter that Jack had never yet seen wane or fade. He hoped he never would. The thought of her broken beyond any hope of redemption was a terrible one.

“So has the General authorised the information-gathering mission, yet?” Her words broke into his thoughts redirecting them to his discussions with Hammond over the last few days. He glanced down at the mug held loosely in his hands, then up at her, meeting her gaze for a brief second before skittering away again.

“Yeah, but it looks like it’ll be a few days before we have a go.”

“Why the delay?” A crease wrinkled her brow. “If we have the information now...”

“Thursday,” Jack said, somewhat obliquely.

“Thursday?” The crease deepened.

“Your appointment with McKenzie is Thursday.”

Her response was immediate, eyes widening in surprise. “You’re waiting until I’m good to go offworld...? But I thought another team...?”

“...would be sent?” Jack finished for her. “Yeah, that’s what I figured, too. But I think McKenzie got to Hammond. Something about including us in the rescue plans for psych purposes. Healing and all that.” Jack gave the psychologist credit for knowing his work. He might not like the guy on a personal level, but there was no denying the man knew his stuff.

“You really think he’d authorise me to go back out on missions again?” It was unusual for Carter to be uncertain about anything, but Jack heard the waver in her voice.

“I think there’s a pretty good chance.” He shrugged and took another sip of his coffee, black and bitter. “We’d rather go with you than without.”

“But you don’t get a choice about it.”

“No,” he admitted. “But I can kick up a stink...”

“Which doesn’t help your reputation any...”

“Carter, since when have I had a reputation with the big brass anyway? Other than one for being unmanageable and insubordinate?”

She grinned, amusement returning to her expression. “Point, sir.” The grin turned into a slight wince as she reached over her shoulder to massage her neck.

It took Jack a second to realise that she was trying to reach the lump where the symbiote had embedded itself at the base of her spine. “Carter?”

“Just a slight headache, sir.”

He grimaced. “The Doc said it won’t clash with what Jolinar left in you.”

“It shouldn’t.” She glanced at him, but her fingers never stopped massaging her nape.

“The locals?”

“According to them, they’ve had some injections against meningitis.”

“They’re not suddenly going to develop a sensitivity to naquadah are they?” Jack said, suddenly alarmed at the prospect of a whole town full of people getting strange tingly feelings anytime Teal’c or Carter went visiting.

Her mouth curved in amusement. “These Goa’uld symbiotes don’t have naquadah, so the people of Steveston have the protein marker but not the naquadah sensitivity.” She shrugged. “General Hammond has some people stationed in the town keeping an eye on the medical state of the population. If they start reacting adversely to food or medication, then there may be a problem, but in the meantime...”

“What they don’t know can’t hurt them?” Jack offered.

“Yeah.” She was still massaging her neck as she spoke.

It didn’t look very effective or comfortable, and after a minute Jack put his mug down and levered himself off the bench. He wasn’t going to watch this without offering something. “May I?” He indicated her neck.

Her expression showed surprise that he’d made the offer at all. Physical contact was something they went out of their way to avoid when not on duty. It was dangerous ground between them, and they long ago decided that the fragility of whatever lay between them was best left untested.

The coward’s way? Maybe.

But it worked.

In an organisation that was just as willing with what worked as with what was defined as rules, the fact that their relationship worked was important.

She looked at him for a long minute, and Jack met her gaze as best he could. Then she nodded, and turned her back to him, giving him access to the lump at her neck.

The pain must have been pretty bad, Jack decided as he rested his fingers on the slope of her shoulders and began smoothing over the lump of the symbiote with his thumbs. She’d never have let him do any such thing if she could have kept a stiff upper lip and borne whatever pain there was.

Gently, he worked his thumbs up and down her nape. The rest of his fingers lightly kneaded the inches where her neck met her shoulders, easing the tension there. Her breathing seemed slower now, more deliberate than it had been before. Relaxed.

Jack was glad of her ease in his presence at least. Some things had changed.

Some things hadn’t.

“Did Daniel tell you about Vang and the Tok’ra?”

He felt the brief spurt of laughter beneath his fingertips, stretched out over the slender grace of her collarbones. “A little bit. She really was trying to get him into bed?”

Jack grinned, remembering the somewhat hunted expression on Vang’s face. “Oh yeah. Daniel was quite peeved.”

“Because he’s usually the one that the Goa’uld go for?” Carter asked, a faint smirk in her voice.

“Well, he might have been peeved over the fact that none of the rest of us would listen to his boring lectures about the writing in the ruins. We weren’t there to listen to him lecture.” He couldn’t quite keep the irritation out of his voice as he spoke of their team-mate. Fond as he was of Daniel - sometimes - the archaeologist could be a real pain in the butt. “I swear I will never take another trip with Daniel unless you or Teal’c are there, too.”

Carter laughed and dropped her head forward even further so her chin rested on her chest. Jack correspondingly began massaging her neck with firmer strokes. “He complained that everyone ignored him for most of the trip.”

“Only because he would have chewed our ears off with his pointless, boring translations,” Jack protested. “I didn’t want to know. Vega didn’t want to know. Vang was too busy trying to elude Vaisha in an area smaller than the Gateroom.” He paused. “There are a lot of ‘Vuhs’ in that last sentence.”

She laughed again, this time a muffled peal of laughter. When she stopped, her voice was a little choked. “So it was all in Daniel’s imagination, then?”

“Well, no it wasn’t,” Jack conceded. “We _were_ ignoring him. But it was for his own good.”

He could hear the raised eyebrows in her voice, “It was for his own good?”

“Yeah. If we hadn’t ignored him, he’d have bored us to tears - or insanity.” Jack’s thumbs had wandered away from the lump on her spinal cord, teasing at the short blonde strands at the base of her skull. “If things got really hairy with the lecturing and the boredom, he could have gotten himself killed.”

“Daniel doesn’t need things to get hairy to get himself killed.”

“I guess he doesn’t.” Jack shook his head and refrained from commenting further on their friend. Daniel was Daniel, and a law unto himself. You liked him, but it had to be said that the urge to punch the living daylights came up at least once a week. On those really annoying weeks, the urge came once a day.

Personally, Jack felt proud that he’d managed six years without thumping Daniel once. Except for the time when he’d had the alien virus and had got jealous over Daniel going to visit Carter. Which had been the virus’ fault. Sort of.

He realised he was mentally babbling to himself and wondered why. Then, he realised that he’d bent forward enough so his nose was just hovering off the edges of her hair. Unintentional and unconscious, but telling.

Jack straightened himself up and continued the massage without further words. He worked her neck between his thumbs until his hands ached from the strain.

“Better?” It seemed that she’d almost fully relaxed now. Her muscles weren’t in knots, and while the lump was still there, no amount of massaging would make the symbiote dissolve any faster.

“Yeah,” she murmured. “Thanks.” She sounded distant and tired. Alone.

The timbre of her tone touched something in his soul. He knew how she felt. He’d felt the ennui in himself.

Oh, there’d always been moments when he’d longed for the things he’d lost since his separation with Sara all those years ago. With one gunshot, he’d lost both son and wife, and so many other things.

Since the severing of the possibilities between him and Carter, he felt the ennui a lot stronger and a lot more often. Part of him wanted to wrench away from her, to yank the fine threads of their connection from her grasp, uncaring of whether they hurt her in the breaking. And another part of him wanted to use those same threads to haul her close, to entrap her in whatever way was possible.

But the part that had control was the part of Jack that insisted on staying still - holding onto what he had and requiring him to be content with it.

There was just one problem, Jack realised as he bent down to brush his lips over the lump at the nape of her neck; the ‘satisfied’ part of him was no longer in control.

Beneath his mouth, she froze, and Jack cursed whatever impulse had caused him to lean down. He pulled back from her; pulled away. Words halted at the edge of his mouth, unsaid, and he frantically tried to think of any of a dozen apologies that she might accept for his hasty actions.

In the end, he didn’t need to apologise.

She turned in his arms, between him and the counter; turned and looked up into his face with her impossibly large, haunted eyes. One hand reached up between them to trace the line of his hair, and he felt the tickle of her touch as she pushed back the crisp grey strands from his face.

When she leaned into him, brushing her lips by his, he trembled a moment, closing his eyes, then bent his head to receive and return the kiss.

All he was doing at that moment was feeling. His senses were completely focused on the taste of her in his mouth - coffee and cookie. Her lips were warm and soft and gentle against his own, and her fingers slid from his cheek into his hair and lightly down the nape of his neck. Shivers played down Jack’s spine and he instinctively leaned into her with body and mouth.

He was seeking salvation. Salvation and an end to the hollow inside him, so long empty and unsatisfied with one-night stands or casual jerk-offs. He wanted more from his personal life - the life he’d been denied and denied until his gun and Charlie and Sara’s actions had taken it from him forever.

The ache in him was hot and hard, and not entirely sexual. It lay in his abdomen, a fierce knot of passions and excuses and reasons why and why not. It scorched him from the inside out as her mouth moved against his. Carter was hungry for what he could give her; both aggressive and submissive, a contradiction and a paradox, entirely her own woman and yet promising to be his also.

And it was as erotic as all hells.

He felt the heave of her breasts against him. Just the faintest touch, but it was intensely arousing, and in ways that went deeper than mere physical reaction. Jack wanted more from this woman than a quick screw for satisfaction. He wanted mornings, noons, and nights; breakfast, lunches, teas, dinners, and suppers; working week and Sunday rest; Earth and moon, sun, sky, heavens, planets, and wormholes. He wanted technobabble in the daylight and sweet laughter in the night; her hand on his arm, hauling him up as they clambered over rocky terrain, and his hand on her hip as they lay in bed together.

Jack wanted too much.

All this spun through his mind, like a body through a wormhole, fast and dizzying, freezing and fiery. And then he was spat out from the thought with a cold, shaking, sick feeling about what they were doing now.

He wrenched himself from her, from the taste of her mouth and the touch of her hands. Wanting and needing, but unable to live with himself without asking first, without being sure.

Did she feel it too? Did she want what he wanted? Was it need or desire or madness - or all three at once? Where did Jack fit into her world and why now and not six months or a year ago? And what about Adamson?

For once he was thinking and she was acting, and he didn’t know if that was good or bad - that her habits of thinking had rubbed off on him or that his habits of acting on instinct had rubbed off on her. He only knew that his body protested at the loss of her against him, and his feelings were raw and chafed.

They looked at each other in the eyes and the face for long moments, seeking revulsion or rejection. They found none. Remorse, yes. But not the others. Never the others.

Slowly, Jack lowered his head to hers, resting forehead against forehead, angling his face so the only point of contact was their brows. “Carter…”

“Sir, I…”

He pressed a thumb lightly over her lips. He didn’t want apologies. He didn’t want recriminations. He didn’t even want an explanation. “I think we need to talk. About this,” he added, unnecessarily. “Just once.”

“What is there to talk about?” She asked, her lips brushing his thumb. Even that contact was more than Jack could bear. His hand slipped to her shoulder and tried not to remember how that little caress felt. “Even…even if we…felt anything, we could never do anything…”

“I know.” The words were gentle and sad. Too close to care, but not so far away that he could avoid watching someone else love her. “Do you think we needed this?”

“Needed this?”

“As a goodbye.”

She lifted her eyes to meet his. “Maybe.” There was the tiniest shrug before she looked away from him completely. “Maybe we never said ‘hello’ in the first place.”

Jack closed his eyes. He was tired again. Bone-deep, soul-deep. They moved on, but their paths circled, like binary stars unable to break from each other’s gravity. It was a holding pattern that they’d tried to end one way or another while still working together as part of SG-1. They’d consciously accepted that there would be no happy ending, but sometimes it seemed as if their unconscious still longed for what they each knew they could not have.

“Jack.” He’d never heard his name on her lips before, not from her, not really. She sounded uncertain, and it wasn’t something he typically associated with Carter. “If it wasn’t for everything...”

“Don’t say it.” His eyes flew open and he shook his head. It was too much, too late. He didn’t need to hear her regrets - he didn’t want to know what he could have had. “Don’t.”

She didn’t, obedient in even this. “You know it, though.”

He knew. “Yes. But you chose to move on.” There was no recrimination in his voice. He didn’t blame her for it. But it tore at him anyway. “And I chose to let you move on.” The decision had been his own as well, to be colleagues and friends as they’d always been.

He took her hand in his own, struggling against the alpha male inside him demanding to take, to conquer, to mark, to claim. It would be easy to do so - too easy. It would be good - too good. And it would tear them apart. Even as much as they’d done today might shred the fragile fabric of their friendship if they weren’t careful. A reckless kiss that had meant everything and could not mean anything.

“Carter...” Jack drew a long, slow breath, looking down at the hand enclosed in his fingers. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

She nodded. “Friends.” A small smile hovered on her lips. Relieved. Regretful.

Neither of them needed to say that they could have been more.

Jack took a step backwards, giving her space, giving himself space. His instincts screamed at him to make some excuse and leave, but he battled them, stubbornly. He might be a little ashamed at what his actions had led to, but he wasn’t going to run and he wasn’t going to fight. He was going to hold his position and dig in for the long haul. Maybe not as _the_ man in her life, but certainly someone in her life whom she valued.

He’d rather die himself than lose her.

So Jack leaned back against the bench, where he’d been before he offered the massage. “Neck better?”

She rubbed it a little, ruefully. “Yes. Thanks.”

Nothing had changed. Jack doubted that the things between them ever would. They would lie and deny until the cows came home, and even if the cows came home, they’d still hold each other at arm’s length, uncertain of how this relationship should be approached.

And, as they turned the conversation to other topics, slowly overcoming the embarrassment of their earlier behaviour, it occurred to Jack that this was the closest to actually saying anything about their state of relationship that they were ever going to get.


	3. Chapter 3

Daniel had been expecting a fairly quiet pickup from the Tok’ra contact. The Tok’ra was said to have some rebel Jaffa in their midst, and Daniel had imagined a nice simple, “We’ve come to take you to Khonsu,” greeting, combined with a short trip up in transporter rings, followed by a longer trip to see the Tok’ra-masquerading-as-a-System Lord.

When did he forget the axiom that anything that could go wrong, would?

He certainly remembered it fast enough when the Jaffa started firing on SG-1’s position.

In the end, the resistance was token. Jack signalled that they should put up their weapons in tacit admittance of outnumbering as the alkesh ringed down even more Jaffa. They were then herded to the ship for transport up to the mothership that was probably waiting in the atmosphere.

And then it was all up to this Tok’ra Khonsu.

A hand landed on his shoulder, fingers biting into flesh and bone as a Jaffa decided that Daniel was not suitably positioned for transfer into the belly of the alkesh. Daniel jerked his shoulder out from under the Jaffa’s harsh grip and settled himself closer to his team-mates, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them as the rings circled down around them and the light beamed them up.

The scent of dust and dirt, so familiar to Daniel after years of grubbing around in it during archaeological digs, clung only briefly to his nostrils before being replaced by the sterile tang of recycled air as they were transported into the alkesh.

 _Another day, another cell,_ Daniel thought dryly to himself as they were herded along the corridors of the alkesh for the transit up to the mothership probably hovering in orbit. He chided himself for being whimsical, then decided that whimsical was not all bad - especially given the grim expressions on the faces of the Jaffa.

SG-1 were settled into the alkesh cells with what the Jaffa should have realised was unusual docility. Of course, the Jaffa footsoldiers weren’t ones to consider tactics, which was part of their downfall as servants of the Goa’uld. And the idea of psychological profiling of one’s enemy was completely out of their realm.

It would be an interesting exercise to write a paper on the differences between human and Jaffa warfare, to look at the cultural indicators that had driven them to their particular modes of weaponry and tactics. Daniel added it to the ‘list of things to do’ for when they decided that he was better used sitting behind a desk in the SGC rather than out on an exploratory team.

“Stop thinking, Daniel.”

Sam and Teal’c promptly glanced over at him, looking for whatever Jack had noticed. Daniel shrugged at Jack. He was in a fairly good temper in spite of the unexpected firefight. “Not much else to do until we reach...” He paused, wondering if the room was bugged. “...our destination,” he finished. “Wherever that might be.” No point in giving possible listeners any hints if they were suspicious at the ease with which they’d captured the fabled SG-1.

“I knew we should have asked Hammond for the scrabble set,” Jack quipped.

Daniel leaned back, slouching against the wall behind the bench on which he and Sam sat. “Too late now.” He glanced sideways at Sam as she moved a little, shifting backwards so she wouldn’t be slouching against the wall. She tilted her head back and closed her eyes, and Daniel resisted the urge to ask if she was okay.

This was Sam’s first offworld jaunt since Aegept, and she seemed fine. Of course, Daniel knew perfectly well that she was an excellent ‘seemed fine’ person. So was he. So was Jack. So was Teal’c.

God, they were a matched set!

“So we just wait, then?”

“We just wait.”

There was probably going to be lots of waiting in the next couple of days.

He checked his pockets for anything with which to pass the time. Arrogant as the Jaffa were, they never seemed to search their prisoners for hidden weapons or anything.

Even after five years of encountering the Tau’ri, it seemed that they still hadn’t quite caught on to the fact that the Tau’ri had pockets in which all kinds of equipment could be kept. Balls of string. Duct tape. Magnesium tape. Swiss army knives. A tattered copy of ‘How to Fly a Jumbo Jet’ - although Daniel wondered whether some galactic version existed wherein the title read: ‘How to Hijack a Goa’uld Mothership.’ Hah! That chapter would have to be written by SG-1.

But otherwise, nothing much.

 _Ho-hum,_ he thought. _Death by boredom._

“Daniel.” Jack waved a hand at him, indicating that he should hand over the book. Daniel handed it over without a fight. He’d tucked that in there after having it pressed on him by one of the SFs - he’d expressed an interest in the book and she’d kept forgetting to bring it. He’d popped it into his jacket pocket on his way to the Gateroom and completely forgotten about it until just then.

He felt no particular urgency to read it right now, so he let Jack take it, and sat back, folding his hands over his stomach and shutting his eyes. A good translation would be appreciated right about _now_. It was a pity there hadn’t been any inscriptions in the planet’s ruins. Then again, given how Jack, Vega, and Vang had treated him during the five-day flight to the nearest planet with a Stargate, maybe it was just as well there weren’t any inscriptions for him to translate.

At the edges of his hearing, there were the sounds of footsteps in the corridor, the whirr and hum of Goa’uld technology, the faint noise of air cycling, and the sound of Jaffa voices crying orders, distantly; faint, pale shadows of their usual force and power.

He opened one eye as Jack snorted at something he’d just read. He was nearly lying down on the wide bench spread across his side of the cell, his boots hanging down to the floor, his head upright as he read the book he’d propped up on his stomach. Beside Jack, Teal’c’s eyes were heavy-lidded, slitted as they stared at a point in the air before him, lost in a prelude to meditation.

Sam shifted on their bench, trying to make herself more comfortable. Her expression was pensive, and Daniel wondered what she was thinking about.

Without effort, his eyes were drawn to Jack, lying down and reading, before he looked back at Sam.

She’d been quiet for most of this mission; partly because she didn’t have an official role in the work of the scientists and partly, Daniel felt, because this was her first offworld mission after Aegept.

Sam had been withdrawn, remote for the weeks during which she’d been forbidden to go off-world. Of course, Daniel didn’t know what things had been like while he and Jack and the others had been on Vaisha’s ship. But when they got back, she smiled tiredly from across her breakfast table as he complained to her of the others’ behaviour, listened and condoled with him.

It was sad to see her so subdued. Sam used to always have an energy about her, whatever she was working on. Before she and Grant began seeing each other, she’d focused it all on her work. Since then, Daniel had been pleased to watch her acquire a sparkle in her demeanour. She laughed a little more openly, smiled a little more broadly, walked with the easy stride of a loved and wanted woman, and it made a difference.

The odd thing was that, since her engagement, some of the reserve had returned. She seemed apprehensive about her engagement with Grant. From what Daniel could tell, she wasn’t rethinking it, she was just...nervous. Which was understandable; there were a lot of questions to work out in this situation. How did a marriage fit in with the daily stresses and survival of the SGC program? How did things work personally between people who had such a great commitment to duty?

He wondered a bit about Jack, too. Jack had been quieter, less ebullient, since Sam got engaged. Some things were the same, but still others had changed.

 _Ca plus la changes, plus qu'ils restent les memes_.

His mind supplied the phrase without conscious effort. And in many ways, things hadn’t changed for SG-1 since Sam got engaged to Adamson. Not obviously.

There were still undercurrents; moments when Daniel thought that Jack might have said something but restrained himself. Moments when Sam looked like she wanted to make some retort but thought better of it. Some things changed.

Some things did not.

Daniel felt the slight jerk as the alkesh put down in the docking bay of a mothership. He opened his eyes in reflex, looking for the change in circumstance, even though his mind knew he wouldn’t be able to see anything.

Over on the other bench, Jack had paused in his reading and was looking up at the ceiling in watchful pose. Teal’c and Sam held the same ‘listening’ positions, although both their eyes were shut. There was a creak, and the faint sound of something being opened or closed. Then the ship was silent.

After a moment, Daniel ventured, “Hey, maybe they’ve forgotten about us.” He grinned at his team-mate’s expressions, each of which swiftly cleared as the clanking sound of footsteps sounded; first fainter, then louder, before coming to stop outside the door of their cell.

As the door slid up, Daniel mused that these Jaffa really weren’t giving due credit to SG-1 in not binding them or restraining them. After all, they were SG-1. They’d saved the world...well...lots of times. More times than Daniel had bothered to count. They’d taken out just as many System Lords, individually and collectively, and generally been a severe pain in the _mikta_ of the Goa’uld right up until the point where Anubis had come along and started trying to weld the Goa’uld together into a whole against the pesky little slaves who refused to remain slaves now that they’d realised that the Goa’uld weren’t the gods they thought they were.

Then he looked beyond the door and realised that this time, due credit didn’t need to be given to SG-1. There were two people waiting for them when the door opened. One man in armour, and a Jaffa behind him. The man in the reddish armour was familiar. Oh, there was a little more grey in the hair and a few more lines in the face, but the arrogant smile was unchanged by three years, and the blue eyes were still sharp and piercing.

Daniel had no doubt that, if he had to, Aris Boch would be quite able to keep SG-1 neatly cooped up. He’d certainly managed to do so before with expert skill.

“You lot are more trouble than you’re worth,” the bounty hunter said, but without any heat.

“What are you doing here?” Jack demanded, jerking upright.

A grin - doubtless deliberately over-cheery to induce teeth-grinding frustration in any prisoner - spread across the heavy features. “Such a welcome, Colonel O’Neill! Anyone would think you were happy to see me!”

 “Yeah, well, propituous circumstances and all,” Jack muttered, climbing to his feet. He eyed the bounty hunter with some measure of trepidation. If the man wasn’t in the loop about Khonsu being a Tok’ra, then the whole situation could get very difficult. “What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you gave up that whole bounty hunting thing.”

“When Lord Khonsu announced that he wanted you four brought in, he decided that it would be a good idea to have insurance along - just in case.” He opened his arms in a mocking parody of a welcome. “You drew the short straw, Colonel.”

And that still didn’t give them a hint whether or not Boch knew about their mission or not.

“So, are we being marched to the dungeons forthwith?” The archaisms sounded a little odd coming from Jack, but then, as Daniel had learned over the years, Jack O’Neill had some unexpected facets.

“Not quite,” Boch said, “We have a small problem.” He stepped aside and two more Jaffa pushed forward a slightly rotund, somewhat forlorn figure into the light of the cell.

Daniel stifled a groan at the sheepish-looking expressions on the face of Dr. Jay Felger.

Jack didn’t bother stifling his reaction. “Felger, what the _hell_ are you doing here?”

“Uh...” The scientist looked like a stunned fish - as if he couldn’t believe Jack was asking such a question. He honestly looked surprised. “Well, uh... We came to rescue you.”

“You’re not doing a very good job,” Jack snapped.

Sam paused, her expression wary. Did you say ‘ _we_ ’?” Her tone of voice was almost tasting the question as she asked it.

“That’s right,” Felger said, perking up. “Coombs is with me.” He tried to shuffle aside, and looked reproachfully up at the impassive Jaffa blocking his way. The Jaffa didn’t move.

A moment later, the balding head of the second of the three scientists peered around Felger’s shoulder. “Hi.”

“Oh, look everybody!” Jack snapped sarcastically, “He’s got _Coombs_ with him!”

 _Uh-oh_ , Daniel thought with a glance at Sam. Her expression was pained.

“Felger,” Jack said in the grim tones of someone holding onto their temper by the thinnest of threads, “Exactly which part of ‘Gate home’ didn’t you understand?”

“Well, we couldn’t just let our fellow SG-team members be taken...” A little voice in Daniel’s head, attuned to the nuances of the English language, noted that Felger wasn’t exactly an SG-team member, so the term ‘fellow SG-team member’ was irrelevant.

“Felger!”

A petulant note entered Dr. Felger’s voice, “What about never leave a man behind?”

Jack’s terse would-be response was cut off by the bounty hunter’s laughter. “Oh this is rich! This is just too good!” Daniel had to admit, there was a certain comedic edge to it. But where it was amusing to Boch, it was an added complication SG-1 didn’t need. Certainly not with the mission hanging over their heads.

Felger drooped at the mockery of the bounty hunter, although a sulky wobble remained at his lip.

Aris continued, undaunted. “What do you want me to do with them, Colonel? I could toss ‘em out the nearest airlock...”

“You wouldn’t!” Dr. Coombs protested, his expression one of sudden shock. “I mean...it was all Felger’s idea!”

Daniel looked from the scientists to Jack, but it was Sam who spoke.

“Are we out of the planet’s orbit yet?”

Aris Boch arched a brow at her. “Got another idea, Major Carter? Not yet. They’re waiting for you to be secured in the mothership cells.” He looked from the now downcast Drs. Felger and Coombs then back to the slightly annoyed SG-1. “Send ‘em back, them?”

“Return post,” Daniel offered, feeling relief that the bounty hunter was on their side, and finding sudden amusement in the situation as a whole. Two geeky scientists who’d rushed in to save SG-1, only to screw everything up. “Sorry, wrong address.”

“You can’t mean that!” Felger said, suddenly anxious. He lunged for the bounty hunter’s sleeve. “Take us instead! Let SG-1 go and take us instead!”

“Us?” Dr Coombs yelped, reaching out and hitting Felger on the shoulder before appealing to Boch. “Take him! It was his idea!”

It was better than any Saturday Night Live sketch, Daniel decided, trying to hide a smile. He caught the edge of Jack’s glare and couldn’t help his cough of laughter. Sam looked like she was caught between disapproval and laughter, and what Teal’c thought was anyone’s guess.

“Colonel?”

Jack glanced at Sam, then at the two miserable scientists. “Send ‘em back,” he said. “And let’s get on with this.”

“But Colonel…” Felger gasped, shocked by the idea. “You’re prisoners! Don’t you want to be freed?”

The expression Jack turned on the man was furious. Daniel suspected his friend’s pride was a little pricked at having been overcome by the Jaffa - even if it was a deliberate surrender. “No, Felger! We _don’t_ want to be freed!”

“You don’t?”

Evidently, Jack trusted Boch and the people the bounty hunter had brought along. “We’re on a mission, you _nit_!” He let that sink into the shocked faces of both scientists, then glanced angrily at Boch. “Get them out of here.”

“As you like, Colonel.” Boch grinned and indicated that one of the Jaffa attending them should take the pair back to the transporter rings.

“Wait! Wait! Can’t we come with you?”

“Oh, shut _up_ , Jay!” Dr Coombs exploded in his high-pitched voice, “You’ve gotten us into enough trouble already!”

“I just thought…” The wind had been taken out of Felger’s sails and his impetus was grinding to a halt.

“ _Don’t_ think!” Coombs snapped. “Just don’t!” And off he stomped down the corridor, a little stumpy figure that went down the wrong passageway and had to be prodded back by the Jaffa.

“Colonel…” Dr. Felger tried one last appeal. Jack was totally unmoved. “Major?”

Sam shook her head. “Just go, Doctor.”

He went, looking like nothing so much as a thoroughly whipped puppy.

Boch chuckled as he turned back to the quartet still standing inside the alkesh cell. “You’ve got quite a devoted follower there.”

“Stupid idiot,” Jack snapped.

“I’m sure he just wants to be loved, Colonel,” Boch said in mock-placatory tones which only served to annoy Jack further. “Okay, now that we have all that business over, let’s show you to your quarters for the next day...” He waved a hand down the now-empty corridor and one of the two remaining Jaffa began leading the way out of the cells.

Daniel glanced at the Jaffa who remained at the door and met the calm, steady gaze of the man. As Boch arched an eyebrow at him, he asked, “I guess these guys are trustworthy?” Jack might trust Boch, Daniel wanted some reassurance.

“I am Dol’ok, free Jaffa,” the man said, his voice betraying insulted pride. “I fight for the freedom of the Jaffa. I follow in the footsteps of Teal’c son of Ronac.” His eyes sought out Teal’c, standing quietly at the back of the group. “ _Tek ma tay_ , Teal’c.”

Teal’c inclined his head to the newcomer. “ _Tek ma tay_ , Dol’ok.”

“Do you mind if we do the introductions later?” Boch asked, sarcasm dripping from his voice. “I hate to interrupt the party, but First Prime Herak is probably coming this way to gloat. He enjoys that.”

“Yeah, I noticed the First Primes usually have a habit of gloating when they catch us,” Jack said. “Do they teach it in Jaffa school or something?”

He got no answer to his question, not even from Boch. Instead, they were lead out of the alkesh and into the belly of the mothership. As they walked through the corridors, Jack asked periodic questions of Aris. None, Daniel noticed, gave away the fact that SG-1 was on a mission, or that Aris was in collusion with them.

Several corridors in, they were met by another party of Jaffa, led by a heavyset man who wore the gold crest of a First Prime.

From the way Boch talked about the First Prime Herak, it had been fairly obvious the two men had no love for each other. The First Prime made it quite clear that he considered the bounty hunter to be only one level removed from galactic scum. They made a lovely couple, Daniel thought to himself with strong irony. Aris introduced the First Prime with a floridity that bordered on insulting. Whether Herak realised he was being mocked was another matter - he was too busy being self-congratulatory about his catch.

Daniel felt like yawning through Herak’s speech just to annoy the Jaffa.

Self-aggrandising, self-satisifed, totally odious, it was your typically overdone bad-guy speech. Jack managed to get a few nicely-worded insults in before Boch had them shuffled off to the cells, interrupting the speech with the excuse of getting them to their cells before the mothership moved off into space.

The cell was like any other Goa’uld cell - with one exception. Four pallets lay on the floor - presumably for SG-1 to sleep on. It was an un-Goa’uld like gesture to provide such comforts for their prisoners and Daniel wondered that the change in _modus operandi_ had not tipped off the more paranoid of the Jaffa.

“Home sweet home,” Aris told them as they walked past him into the cell.

“Yeah, just like the real thing,” Jack said. “We could do with a log fire, though.”

The Jaffa were looking more than a little confused. Aris, however, chuckled. “I’ll see to it at the first possible moment, Colonel. Would you like wine?”

“Wine would be great, although I could do with a really cold beer.”

“I’m afraid this place doesn’t provide the level of service you’re used to, Colonel.”

“Well, we’ll stay this time,” Jack told him, magnanimously, “But you’re not going to get repeat business with these amenities.”

“Well, I’ll be sure to let Lord Khonsu know that the quarters aren’t satisfactory, then.” A single gesture by Boch brought the cell door down, and then the measured footsteps of bounty hunter and Jaffa retreated into the distance.

Daniel sat himself down on the nearest pallet with not a little relief. At least his butt wouldn’t be numb by the end of the trip. With one finger, he prodded the material from which the pallet was made. It was some kind of coarsely-spun fiber woven together in a series of interlocked mats. It wasn’t exactly feather down, but it was good enough for him.

Beside him, Sam had been doing the same thing. She glanced up, caught Daniel’s gaze, and glared at him as he grinned pointedly at her and flopped down sideways on the pallet.

Maybe he’d even get a little sleep. _Ooh. Sleep would be good._

That idea went a moment later. There would be no sleep with Jack in such a fury about the unexpected appearance of the scientists. “I don’t _believe_ this,” he muttered as he paced about the cell - the only member of SG-1 not to sit or lie down. “I _told_ Felger to gate home...”

“Doctor Felger possesses a strong desire to be a hero,” Teal’c stated. He’d shut his eyes to go into a state of _kel no reem_. Of course, Jack’s pacing made that impossible. “It would override his common sense.”

“That’s assuming the man _had_ any common sense to begin with!” Jack snapped back. The only response he got from Teal’c at his snarl was a raised eyebrow. “Sorry, Teal’c,” he said in a mollifying tone of voice. “But it was stupid! Stupid, stupid, _stupid!_ ”

Daniel shrugged, minded to be more forgiving since nothing bad had actually come of it. “They probably thought they were doing the right thing, Jack.”

“The road to hell is paved with the skulls of idiots who thought they were doing the right thing, Daniel,” Jack retorted, stopping and pushing his fists into his eyes. “Seen it before. They could have screwed this whole thing up...”

“They didn’t.”

“Only because they got caught by Boch! Anyone else and the game would be up. How the hell would you propose we work this with two clumsy oafs, one who’d start at every shadow, the other who had a bad case of hero-worship?” The way Jack was pushing against his eyes, his eyeballs had to be somewhere in the centre of his head by now. Daniel watched with the fascination of someone watching a train wreck.

“We were lucky,” Sam said, quietly from her pallet. She laid one forearm over her eyes. “They got caught by Aris Boch before they had a chance to do anything.”

“Yeah,” Daniel echoed. “Look, Jack, they’ve been sent back to the planet, we’re on our way to Khonsu, we’ve got Aris Boch on our side...” Come to think of it, Daniel wasn’t so sure that was a good thing. But it wasn’t important, not really. “It’s working out, Jack.”

“Daniel Jackson is correct, O’Neill,” Teal’c said calmly, still refusing to open his eyes. “There are as yet no problems with our infiltration.”

“Yet.” Jack looked like he wanted to keep looking for trouble, but after a moment, he rolled his eyes and sat down on his pallet. “I just hope it stays that way.”

*

Sam turned over on the pallet. The fibers were coarse and the mat a little lumpy. It was better than the floor, but not by much.

Still, she supposed as she stared up at the ceiling with her hands folded on her stomach and her ankles crossed, jailers generally weren’t out to make their prisoner’s lives more comfortable.

There was a slight restlessness that was manifesting itself in her body. Not quite pain, but the kind of ache in her limbs that made her want to jump up and down and shake herself out. In spite of her ennui, she felt a smile touch her lips as she contemplated such an undiginified move, shaking herself around like someone in the throes of a seizure.

The smile faded. If she was honest with herself, her discomfort was not entirely just with their accommodations.

As far as General Hammond was concerned, sending Sam out on this mission was a risk. Even the simplest of information-gathering missions had been known to turn ugly in the blink of an eye, and Sam had only just been reinstated to full offworld capacity. Then, too, there was the matter of exactly which information SG-1 was gathering in this case - information about Lieutenant Colonel Grant Adamson’s whereabouts.

In his office, Hammond had noted that he’d never had any reason to complain of her behaviour before, so she would be in on this mission. Sam hadn’t been sure if he’d been referring to her relationship with Grant over the last year, or...other things...before Grant.

Her eyes automatically tracked over to Colonel O’Neill, lying less than a yard away on his pallet. While Daniel was sprawled out on his belly, his legs dangling off the edges of his pallet; and Teal’c was sitting on his bedroll, back ramrod-straight; the Colonel appeared to have adopted a pose that was almost uncannily like her own. His hands were folded over his stomach, his legs stretched out and crossing at the ankles.

As if he could feel her gaze on him, his eyes opened. One corner of his mouth quirked upwards in wry acknowledgement. “Can’t sleep?”

“Just a little restless,” she murmured, glancing over at their team-mates to check if they were waking at the sounds of their voices.

He nodded, “It’s a long way to go for information,” he said, a slightly droll note in his voice.

“But at least it’s not a five-day trip through Goa’uld-occupied space?” Sam asked, smiling.

He turned on his side to face her, propping himself up on one elbow. “Don’t remind me,” he muttered, residual exasperation with Daniel coming out, even after the mission.

Sam turned on her side, matching his pose so she was facing him and when she looked up, his eyes were still intent upon her.

“You okay?” He asked, and there was a softer quality to his voice than she was used to hearing from him.

It was strange. She knew so much about this man, and yet, simultaneously, so little. She’d seen him in almost all his moods through the years, borne the brunt of his anger and the force of his need, learned how to deal with him in professional command and as a woman who cared about him, and lived with the knowledge that they cared for each other more than they should.

And simply because she’d loved, dated, and engaged herself to Grant didn’t mean she didn’t still care about Jack O’Neill. It just...complicated things. Or simplified them. She still wasn’t sure which.

“Yeah,” she answered, just as quietly, “I’m fine.”

He kept staring at her, his gaze flickering over her features in a scrutiny that made her slightly uncomfortable. Especially in the knowledge of what had nearly transpired between them the other day.

He might have begun it with the kiss to her nape, with the sensuous brush of his lips over her skin, but she’d continued it when he’d pulled back. She’d drawn him down to her and crossed the line to lead him over.

Why had she done it?

The question had echoed in her mind long after he left, unhurriedly. They had talked as friends do, residual embarassment on their faces. They had kissed and, on the surface at least, there was no shame between them. But Sam had gone to bed that night and dreamed of kissing a man. Which man, she hadn’t been able to say. He blurred in her arms and against her lips, familiar and stranger, but loved nevertheless. She still didn’t know which man her mind had conjured for her - or if it even was either of them.

Love was not desire and desire was not love, but her care for the Colonel was not entirely cerebral. There was attraction there, woman to man - and affection also, friend to friend. There were similarities and differences, and difficulties and hangups. It was just the same as any couple, and no obstacles were insurmountable if one really was willing to scale them.

So why had she accepted Grant’s proposal?

There had been moments like this, all through her engagement, where she wondered about the rightness of what she was doing. Did she really have a right to tie herself down to Grant when she felt so uncertain of her own care for him?

She loved Grant. She knew that. But she loved the Colonel also. They were two men, similar and different, proud and stubborn and passionate in their own ways, and they challenged her in their own ways, personal and professional.

How was she supposed to choose between them like this? How did she know what was right?

“We’ll get him back,” he said, quietly, intently.

What would he have said if he’d known that was no reassurance?

She was all mixed up inside, torn two ways, jumbled around. Between this man and the man they were trying to locate and rescue, there were choices and more choices. It was such a quandary, with Sam in the middle of it all. It had seemed a quandary when she agreed to marry Grant. How much more confusing now after she’d lost him and kissed the Colonel and was getting Grant back?

“I know,” she murmured, lifting her head off her hand and lowering it to the pallet so she was just lying on her side.

He just watched her, his expression changing minutely from moment to moment. His thoughts were opaque to her, but that didn’t matter. She was watching him, just as intently, unwilling to relinquish the sight of him just yet.

There was stubborness in the set of his jaw and a lean, focused elegance in the lines of his face; good humour in the broad mouth and the way his nose - longer than he liked, but really quite sweet - twitched a little when he smiled. Intelligence and drive gleamed in the dark eyes - characteristics the Air Force had honed into a weapon for their use.

He returned her gaze, the dark eyes intimate and strangely wistful as they clung to her face.

Her heart beat a little unevenly as his gaze continued, unabated. A woman would be dead and buried long before she failed to be moved by his eyes lingering on her.

It was, she admitted, moments like this one that had brought them to each other in her kitchen that day. The attraction that pulled them together as officers, colleagues, and friends. That and the subtle tension that strung between them, balancing professional loyalties against personal desires and finding the balance weighing in favour of the call of duty.

They’d clung to duty like a shield and a life raft, telling themselves they weren't willing to explore new territory, that they were content to cover the same, familiar ground. But they’d tempted fate anyway, exchanging glances, allowing contact, never permitting the connection between them to totally erode.

Maybe that was the problem.

If they’d let go, severing the interreliance between them, then they’d never have come to this pass.

Of course, that would have meant one or the other leaving SG-1, and that was unthinkable.

“What do you think of Boch?” She indicated the door of their cell, as much to draw his eyes away from her as to mark the change of topic.

The Colonel shrugged. “We get occasional reports about him from the Tok’ra. He started helping out some of their operatives. Still delivers prisoners to the Goa’uld, but he sometimes helped run interference for the Tok’ra.”

This was stuff that Sam hadn’t heard about. She got the Tok’ra reports every time they came in, but nothing about this.

“Trustworthy?”

“In his own way. According to what the Tok’ra council report, he’s mellowed a bit. It makes some sense that he’d be here. The Goa’uld have a bad track record of keeping hold of prisoners who are trained in thinking for themselves.” A wry grin creased his face as he acknowledged that SG-1 had been among the prisoners who’d contributed to that bad track record. “Boch knows not to underestimate his catch.”

Sam nodded, half-smiling at him. Although the Colonel had his own stubborn pride, he was also quite aware of his failings. Their capture by Boch of several years past had been a humiliation the Colonel hadn’t enjoyed at all, so it said a lot that he seemed to have acquired fairly decent respect for the bounty-hunter by now.

“Did the Tok’ra chemists ever work out the addictive properties of the _roshna_?” Sam asked, suddenly remembering the small vial tossed to her by the bounty hunter. Human scientists had examined it to no avail, then handed over the remainder to the Tok’ra for study.

Dark eyes looked back at her, “You’re the scientist, Carter. You tell me.”

She shook her head, “It was never in the reports. You knew about Aris Boch’s involvement with the Tok’ra...”

“But not about the chemical stuff, Carter.” The Colonel shrugged as best he could at the angle he was lying. “The Tok’ra have moved several times since we first encountered Boch - not a lot of surprise that they’d lose the stuff in the move...”

Sam made a mental note to check with the Tok’ra the next time an opportunity came up. Although she might be able to just ask the hunter himself whether they’d worked out how to synthesise the _roshna_ so Boch’s people to have their own supply. Still, that was a consideration for later.

She rolled over onto her back, staring up at the ceiling of the cell again. The plan was simple in principle; be captured by Khonsu’s forces and taken to his planet, get information about Grant and the route his prison convoy would take through space; escape from Khonsu, and set up a rescue for Grant.

Simple.

Things were always simple in principle, it was in practicality that everything went down the tube. There were myriad ways for such an operation to go wrong. Events that would not happen, connections that might not be made. The possibility of betrayal by those involved in the plot could not be discounted.

And Grant’s rescue hung on such a thin, delicate thread.

She wanted him rescued. Of that, at least, there was no doubt. Their people remained their people, and nobody got left behind if humanly possible. In the professional arena, she had no doubts at all. She knew how her role circumscribed her and ruled her, and where she could tread with safety and where the map was marked ‘here be dragons’.

She liked knowing.

Unfortunately, after Grant’s rescue and return to her, everything got cloudy again.

 _Don’t kid yourself, Sam,_ she thought, not a little grimly. _It’s not after Grant’s rescue or return that everything gets confusing, it’s after you let Colonel O’Neill kiss you the other day._

“Y’know, Carter,” he said quietly. “We’ll work it out.” For a moment, she thought he was talking about the kiss in her kitchen and her cheeks flushed. Then he continued talking and she chided herself for thinking that he would discuss _that_. “We’re SG-1. We’ll work out a plan and get ourselves out of it, right?”

She grinned at his nonchalance. How much of it was bravado, and how much was truth, she didn’t know. She didn’t really care either. If nothing else, the Colonel believed in his team and their ability to do just about anything. And because he believed, so did she. And, more often than not, that was enough.

The ship shuddered slightly beneath them.

Across the room, Teal’c’s eyes opened.

Daniel rolled over onto his back and grunted, opening one eye and scrunching up his face.

Sam’s gaze tracked across the ceiling of the cell as she listened to the very faint sounds of the ship slowing, slowing, slowing...stopping. She turned to look at the Colonel, who returned her gaze.

They were in orbit around Khonsu’s planet.

*

Daniel was grumpy, but he thought Sam was being grumpier.

And Jack was the grumpiest.

Grumpy. Grumpier. Grumpiest.

Daniel felt like he was in an illustration for ‘Sesame Street’.

“Am I going to have to separate you two?” Jack snapped after Daniel grumbled under his breath about Sam drumming her fingers on her ‘seat’.

In a moment of childish restlessness, Daniel stuck his tongue out at Jack. Then he spotted Sam doing exactly the same thing at the same moment. They dissolved into laughter that melted away their irritation with each other - and only heightened Jack’s irritation with them. The glare he shot them should have singed their butts, but they only grinned harder.

It was as much a relief from the unending tension as amusement.

From the moment they’d been herded into this room and into the ‘dais’ with the force shield around them, frustration had grown large and tempers had grown short. Hours slipped by and they waited for someone to get back to them, for someone to let them know what was going on. No news came.

Teal’c had gone into _kel no reem_ after the first hour. Daniel suspected it was more to escape his team’s growing restlessness than because he needed healing or relaxation. Conversation was small and desultory, and increasingly scarce as time wore on. Sam fell asleep for a bit, jerking abruptly awake for no reason that Daniel could determine. Jack’s inquiry after her was met with a short reply and she relaxed back but didn’t fall asleep again.

Hours had passed. SG-1 had slept, stretched, moved around, paced, argued. And still no news came.

Footsteps passed the doorway, there were shouts and cries, but nobody came in. They speculated on what might have happened until Jack put the kibosh on that. “It’s not going to do us any good to imagine what’s gone wrong.”

On one level, he was right. On another, Daniel figured they could at least prepare for the worst case scenario.

And then finally, some seven or eight hours after they’d first been shoved into the room, someone came in.

The door hissed open and in stepped Aris Boch. Behind him, the door hissed shut.

“What’s happening?” Jack demanded, even before the other man approached the dais. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, a lot of things have happened in the last couple of hours, Colonel,” Aris informed them. “You wouldn’t _believe_ how much has happened.”

The loaded tones sent a brief chill down Daniel’s back as the bounty hunter did whatever it was he did to bring down the force shield.

“So give us the short version.”

Daniel winced at Jack’s snap. The bounty hunter didn’t. “The First Prime accused Khonsu of being Tok’ra, Khonsu denied it, Dol’ok executed Herak and got himself a promotion. Some of the Jaffa aren’t buying Khonsu’s story and there’ve been skirmishes in the corridors. And then we got a delivery we weren’t expecting.” The tone of Aris Boch’s voice suggested that it was the absolute last thing they’d needed or wanted at this stage.

Jack’s eyebrows jumped. “So, we won’t be getting that information?”

“Oh, you’ll be getting that information. You just won’t be getting it the way you expected,” Boch told him flatly. “And we’re splitting you up. I take Major Carter and Dr. Jackson - you and Teal’c are going in a different direction.”

Quicker than Daniel thought possible - certainly before Jack could get more than a single syllable of protest out - Boch had a weapon drawn on them. There were no threats and no entreaties, just two shots and two direct hits.

Jack and Teal’c went down as if poleaxed.

Daniel knew better than to leap at Boch. Common sense told him that the bounty hunter would have protection against anything SG-1 might level at him.

As Daniel got down beside Jack to check his friend for injury, Sam was already down beside Teal’c, checking his pulse. After a moment, she nodded at Daniel to indicate that the big guy was still alive. Daniel found Jack’s pulse, steady and strong, and gave her a nod of reassurance. Whatever had been done to them, they were still breathing.

Sam looked at Boch. “What was that for?”

“Too many questions, Major,” Boch lowered his weapon, although Daniel was fairly certain that it could be brought to bear more swiftly than they’d be able to disarm him. “You’re going to have to trust me in this. I can get you back to Earth...”

“What about them?” Sam demanded, her hand still on Teal’c’s shoulder.

Boch ‘holstered’ his weapon. “They’re going back with Khonsu and Dol’ok. See, it’s like this. We want you all to get out of here in one piece. You can believe us or not on that point. However, the Jaffa would really like to see you guys dead - or in the hands of a real Goa’uld. And it’s going to look suspicious if Khonsu, Dol’ok and myself are seen leading SG-1 out of the prison to an escape vessel.”

“So this is all…subterfuge?” Daniel waved a hand at Jack and got to his feet. He didn’t entirely trust Boch, but there was sense to what the bounty hunter was saying.

“I like that word. ‘Subterfuge.’ Yeah,” Boch told them. “It’s all subterfuge. Now, you can come with me and significantly increase your chances of getting out of here with your lives, the lives of your team-mates, _and_ with Khonsu’s reputation mostly intact so you still have a Tok’ra spy in the Goa’uld hierarchy; _or_ you can stay here, probably get captured by the Jaffa loyal to the Goa’uld, and end up in the hands of the System Lords or with a snake in your head. Take your pick.”

They looked at each other and grimaced. “You haven’t left us with much choice,” Daniel observed.

“Choice, Dr. Jackson, is overrated.” Boch pointed at the door. “I have a half-dozen Jaffa outside the door. Some are free Jaffa, some aren’t. They’re going to help escort you to my ship, believing I’m taking you two as my payment for services rendered. You’ll come on my ship, we’ll get you the hell out of here, and along the way, you’ll pick up some of the information you came for in the first place. Deal?”

Sam looked less than pleased. Daniel knew the signs. Her eyes narrowed a little, and she did something with her mouth that made her look a lot tougher. She glanced at Daniel, then at the unconscious Jack. “Okay,” she said at last. “Deal.”

Daniel pulled her to one side, “Are you sure about this?”

“If the Jaffa have rebelled against Khonsu…”

“We only have his word for that.”

“We don’t have time to verify this.”

“Sam…”

“Daniel.”

There was no doubt that Sam was better at situational risk analysis than he, but Daniel couldn’t help the niggling doubts in his mind. “We could be walking into a trap.”

A tired smile touched her lips, “Then let’s do it with our eyes _open_. We’ll take the chance he’s right.”

“Jack’s gonna kill you,” Daniel pointed out, unnecessarily. They both knew that Jack would probably flay Sam alive - after the first moment of relief when they all met again.

“Probably,” she said, sounding as though it didn’t bother her one bit. “We’ll all have to get out of here, first.”

“Time’s a-wasting, you two.” Boch indicated the door with the gun. “Coming or not?”

“You swear that Khonsu’s going to try to get them out?” Sam asked.

“I swear it by my reputation among the Goa’uld as a procurer of rarities.” The claim was expansive, the gesture florid. Daniel was quite unimpressed. “Now, are we moving?”

They were moving. Reluctantly, but moving.

Outside the chamber, Jaffa fell in around them, hemming them in. Daniel glanced over the foreheads of the men and noted several different brands marking the men. A mixed bag of warriors, it appeared, all of them now serving Khonsu in his guise as a Goa’uld minor lord.

As they marched them down the corridors of the grounded mothership, Daniel wondered how the mix-n-matched Jaffa found it, working alongside men who’d once been their sworn enemies. Never mind that they’d now sworn anew to a new master - surely there’d be conflicts. The Jaffa were a proud race, born proud, trained proud. The fall of a master in battle and the service to a new master would be a matter of personal and professional honour.

He dragged his attention back to their situation. Now was not a good time for daydreaming. He caught Sam’s eye and smiled, conveying a confidence in her command abilities that he presently didn’t feel. Much as he cared about Sam, he hadn’t been under her command often enough to really trust her judgement, although he would never say otherwise.

They passed other squads of Jaffa, far more than should have been around if there wasn’t a fight going on somewhere.

If.

It seemed that Aris Boch shared Daniel’s silent concerns, because he stopped the next squad of Jaffa. “What’s going on?”

The Jaffa glanced over the party, his gaze skipping lightly over the two humans trapped in the ranks of Jaffa. “Several Jaffa have gone into the main drives room and are sabotaging the ship. They claim Lord Khonsu has betrayed the Goa’uld.”

“They’re sabotaging main drives?” Boch muttered. He stared very hard at the Jaffa. “Very well. Carry on.” The Jaffa walked away, and Boch signalled the group to keep moving.

Daniel leaned over towards Sam as they started walking again, “Not good news.”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

They felt the shudder of the mothership as it rocked on its foundations. Close. Too close. For a few precious seconds, they struggled to retain their balance, grabbing hold of whatever they could.

There was a moment when Daniel contemplated reaching out and trying to lift a zat gun from one of the Jaffa around them. It swiftly passed. If things got really bad, then they’d nick weapons and defend themselves. In the meantime, their best offence was to appear harmless - they’d be overlooked, forgotten, just a couple of cowed prisoners.

 _Okay_ , Daniel thought to himself, looking at Sam’s determined stride, _maybe not quite cowed._

There were shouts and cries through the mothership, and several bands of Jaffa ran past them, apparently in disarray. Daniel and Sam watched them go, only too aware that if any of the bands of Jaffa happened upon their team-mates, then Jack and Teal’c were dead.

But they’d put their trust in Aris Boch, and they’d have to hold to it for their sake as much as for his. At least until it was proven otherwise.

They turned a corner. The bounty-hunter waved a hand in front of a panel beside a large door. It beeped, and the door slid back with a soft _hiss_ of hydraulics to reveal the interior of a docking bay, where two _tel’tak_ s rested on the landing pads.

“Okay,” Boch said, pulling his weapon from its holster and addressing the Jaffa, “Nice as it’s been to work with you gentlemen, I’m taking my catch and shaking the dust of this place from my feet.”

The head Jaffa inclined his head to the bounty hunter. He was a huge bear of a man who probably dwarfed Teal’c - although he carried considerably more body hair than Daniel’s friend. “The Goa’uld and loyal Jaffa will rejoice to hear of the capture of SG-1.”

“I’m sure they will,” Boch said. “Frankly, as long as I get paid, I don’t care.”

The speaker didn’t seem to feel any need to answer that. He bowed, wheeled smartly, and led his men away. Daniel saw them turn the corner before Boch swiped his hand past the panel again, closing the door. “Okay, into the _tel’tak_.”

“What about the Colonel and Teal’c?”

Boch indicated the small cargo ship. “ _Tel’tak_ first, questions later.”

Sam didn’t look like she’d be moving just yet. “Questions, now. The Jaffa have reached the mothership drives. Since they’re Jaffa, they’ll destroy them with staff weaponry. That might work for the flight drives which are crystal, but the hyperdrives are naquadah based. It will take some time for it to get to critical mass, but when it does, this ship - and probably half the planet - is going to explode. You’re asking us to get on a ship and leave our team-mates to die.”

“No,” the bounty hunter replied with more than a trace of irritation. “I’m asking you to trust that Khonsu and I worked this all out so we could get all of you out from under the noses of the Goa’uld. My job was to get you out, not to play heroics!”

Sam didn’t look like she was going to budge anytime soon.

Daniel was torn. On one hand, he didn’t want to leave Jack and Teal’c behind to certain death. On the other, he didn’t particularly care to _stay_ around for certain death, either. “Do you have a comlink connection to Khonsu?” he asked. “One of those long-distance telecommunications balls or something?”

“No. But I do have a comlink with which I can communicate with Khonsu,” Boch said, dryly. He pointed at the door of the _tel’tak_ , activating something so the doors opened. “It’s in there.” He didn’t quite smirk as they walked past him, but it was close.

Inside the _tel’tak_ , he waved them to the cargo space. “Sit down and be quiet. I’ll contact Khonsu, but you have to let me do the talking.”

Ignoring the shooing motion, Sam took the co-pilot’s seat. Boch gave her a hard look, which she returned evenly. He looked at Daniel who took up position with his hip against the console in the middle of the cabin and folded his arms. He wasn’t moving until he knew the status of his friends.

Grudging acceptance pulled at Boch’s mouth as he pressed a sequence of keys on the dashboard and leaned forward. “Aris Boch to Lord Khonsu. I have my cargo and am preparing for flight.”

“This is Lord Khonsu,” came back the voice, unmistakeably Goa’uld. “You will not reconsider assisting my Jaffa in stamping out this rebellion? The rewards would be considerable.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I can offer you nothing to make you reconsider?”

Daniel frowned. This wasn’t exactly Goa’uld behaviour - an admission of weakness was anathema among the System Lords. Khonsu’s implied statement that he could not control the rebellion with his own troops would be tantamount to saying he was not fit to rule.

“Lord Khonsu, I see no point in being greedy. Dr. Jackson and Major Carter will fetch a more-than-adequate price for me. And you wished for the other two to be held in custody for Anubis.” Boch was being both placating and firm.

“Very well,” the voice coming through the communications sounded snippy. “The Jaffa monitoring space-bound flight have your authorisations. I wish you good fortune wherever you are bound.”

“Thank you, Lord Khonsu.” Boch paused, glancing over at Sam and Daniel. “I hear the planets along the Criosanna are particularly nice at this time of year.”

There was a noise suspiciously like a laugh. “You would do better in the evergreen forests of Dienatos, bounty hunter. The red deer there run free beneath the three moons in early spring. Quite a challenge for a man of your skills.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Boch out.”

And before Daniel could protest, Boch had hit a button, terminating the conversation.

Daniel stared. “And you got that Jack and Teal’c are okay from _that_?”

Oddly enough, Boch didn’t say anything. Instead, he looked at Sam. “Major Carter?”

“They’re fine, Daniel,” she said after a moment. “And Khonsu’s the Tok’ra he claims to be.”

Daniel looked from Sam’s face to Boch’s, confused. He’d heard nothing more than a very ambiguous exchange. Admittedly, there might be code words that had been used, but for the most part… “Sam, how can you know this?”

Boch indicated the cargo room with no small amount of sardonicism. “If you wouldn’t mind holding the information session in there while I work on getting us out of here before Khonsu’s rebel Jaffa end up blowing us all to hell?”

Jack would have made some smart-ass comment about having been to hell and making it out. Daniel wasn’t in the mood, and from the slightly shocked look on Sam’s face, she wasn’t either. He followed Sam into the _tel’tak_ cargo bay and watched as she closed the door behind them.

“Well?”

“It’s a code,” she said quietly, going over to some boxes and sitting down on them. “A very old one between Khonsu and Jolinar.”

Daniel took up a seat on another box and replayed the conversation over in his head. “Jolinar knew Khonsu?”

“She knew Arkhan - the Tok’ra who is presenting himself as Khonsu. Arkhan and Jolinar worked together back when the Tok’ra first began the fight against the Goa’uld. Malkshur was their base of operations to begin with.” Sam rested her elbows on her knees and scraped her fingers through her hair. “For a while, they were lovers before their work for the Tok’ra took them to opposite sides of the galaxy, but they remained friends. They had codes for each other - codes upon codes upon codes…”

“And you remembered them now?”

She looked up at him. “Only when he said them. It was a game between them. A whole sub-language buried in their conversations - coded phrases that sounded innocuous to anyone else. They had a hundred years to refine it, make it flexible to whatever purpose they required.”

“So all that stuff about the Dienatos forests..?”

“Forests indicate an extraction. If it’s wildlife, they’re friendlies; if tame, then neutrals or enemies. Any number in the statement indicates the number being extracted, and the season indicates time proximity - early spring is soon - no more than a couple of hours, winter is more than a year.”

In the background, they could hear the faint hum and whine of the _tel’tak_ ’s engines gaining power. Daniel considered it, and realised that it was a very flexible system - it could convey quite a bit of information without having to resort to specifics. He did the ‘translation’ in his head, looping back through the conversation, and frowned.

“Sam?”

She glanced up at him, her attention distracted from her thoughts by his querying tone.

“Why _three_ moons?”

*

Teal’c woke up with a headache and the sixth sense prickling along his neck that something had gone wrong.

As he hauled himself up, his battered consciousness registered several things. Firstly, that O’Neill lay supine mere yards away. Secondly, that the room in which they were held was now otherwise empty of anyone but he and O’Neill - Daniel Jackson and Major Carter were not present. Thirdly, that footsteps had just stopped outside in the corridor and someone was even now keying in the combination to open the door of their prison.

These three things caused concern within him, but he had no time for mere instinctual reactions.

He crawled over to O’Neill as the door opened. While his friend possessed remarkable resistance to zatfire, the weapon Aris Boch had used against them was not a _zat’nik’a’tel_. Teal’c doubted it was Goa’uld weaponry at all. A quick check of his friend confirmed that O’Neill was unconscious, but alive. He felt a thin thread of relief take hold of him, before the other threads of concern for his missing team-mates took hold.

But he had no time to be concerned for them - not presently. The man who swept into the cell surrounded by Jaffa was host to a symbiote. Tok’ra or Goa’uld, Teal’c didn’t know. But he could feel the tingle in his veins signifying the proximity of naquadah.

Physically, the man was tall as Teal’c; less broad in the shoulders, but more so than O’Neill. In feature, he was handsome, but there was a certain cast to his face that gave his seeming beauty just a hint of the diabolic. His cropped blonde hair stuck wildly up, but the effect was not one of dishevelment but of a deep intense arrogance.

“ _Shol’va_ Teal’c,” said the man, his pale eyes fixing Teal’c calmly. “And Colonel O’Neill of SG-1. I am Lord Khonsu.”

Teal’c said nothing, his attention hardly on the putative Tok’ra. Instead, he was watching the Jaffa, looking for the spark within their eyes that might indicate which ones were free and which ones still considered the Goa’uld gods.

Beside him, O’Neill groaned as consciousness imposed its requirements on him. He muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “I’m gonna _kill_ Boch the next time I see him.”

Khonsu made a faint noise in the back of his throat before he turned on his heel and ordered the Jaffa. “Bring them.”

Judging by the ungentle way they were hauled to their feet and prodded along, Teal’c gathered that they had not fallen into friendly hands. As he stumbled on his feet, cursing the remaining lethargy that threatened his movements, Teal’c tried to recall the situation that had resulted in his unconsciousness. His last memory was of Aris Boch pointing the weapon at him and a bright flash.

They were to get the information they had come for, but not in the way they had expected. That much, he recalled.

 _And we’re splitting you up._ The bounty-hunter had said.

Teal’c frowned. They had, indeed, been split up, however it did not appear that this situation was to the benefit of SG-1.

He glanced behind him at O’Neill, noting that his friend appeared to have thrown off most of the lingering effects of Aris Boch’s weapon. That he had not thrown them all off was evident in the way he had not yet demanded an accounting of Khonsu regarding the location of their team-mates. Still, judging by the way O’Neill stalked in the midst of the Jaffa, Teal’c estimated that his friend was in no good mood.

One of the Jaffa prodded him with his staff weapon. “Your friend is coming. Worry more about your own destination, Teal’c son of Ron’ac.” The warning was stern, but not unkind, and Teal’c kept his gaze on the Jaffa who had spoken for several moments more before turning back to the corridor and continuing to walk.

They were moving from deep within the centre of the mothership out to the fringes. Teal’c narrowed his eyes. According to his ship-sense, they were headed towards one of the ship bays from which smaller spacecraft could be launched.

Escape, or merely transportation to another prison?

Beneath his feet, the floor shook as an explosion sounded in the distance, and the men tottered, all thrown off balance by the unexpected movement of the mothership.

Teal’c stumbled before regaining his balance. He looked up at the ceiling of the corridor and trying to determine from where the explosion had come. Others were doing the same.

“We are under attack,” cried one Jaffa, gripping his staff weapon more tightly in his hand. “My Lord, give us leave to man the defenses...”

“It was not an attack from outside,” said another, shaking his head in negation. “The explosion came from within the mothership.”

“But who would seek to destroy...?”

“It will be the rebel Jaffa,” Khonsu said as the ground beneath them stabilised. “Dol’ok executed Herak, but it seems Herak’s lies have spread beyond him to others with treacherous intent.” The ice-blue eyes narrowed as he indicated the corridor ahead down which they should continue. “The traitors will pay dearly for their betrayal.”

Teal’c acknowledged the cleverness in the story. It held elements of truth cleverly wound among the lies and would provide Khonsu with great flexibility and yet supreme control of the situation. It seemed that Khonsu was an experienced player in the game of the Goa’uld.

Further along the corridor there were shouts, and a party of Jaffa ran into view carrying weapons. Before Khonsu could make his way to the forefront of the group, the Jaffa had opened fire.

Teal’c leapt for the floor. He had no weapon with which to fight. He might seize one from a downed Jaffa, but it would not be left in his hand for long. Then, too, there was more at stake here than mere survival. He hit the ground, felt the grit of dust and dirt overlaying the smooth surface of the flooring beneath his hands. With his senses, Teal’c stretched out around him, trying to judge what was happening, trying to pick a moment and a movement.

A glance over his head showed that many of the Jaffa opposing them were already down. Some few around Teal’c had fallen, but many were taking shelter behind the buttresses of the corridor and hiding from the shots being fired that way.

In the back of his mind, Teal’c recognised that such tactics were unconventional among the Jaffa. ‘Stand and fight’ was the usual approach of Teal’c’s people and it had not changed in thousands of years of service. So he eyed the Jaffa who kept to the sides of the corridor with a keen gaze.

He looked around, seeking sight of his friend. O’Neill had scrambled behind one of the buttresses and was wedged down on the floor, looking very much as though he wished he had a zat in his hand. Teal’c understood.

“You okay?” O’Neill mouthed at him, barely audible over the whine of zats discharging, and the burst of fire from staff weapons. Teal’c nodded and rolled over to the nearby wall, hoping for a little more protection from the fire that spattered the corridor.

There were still many opponents standing when a handful of Jaffa walked from the intersecting corridor, took one look at the fight and began firing themselves. Within seconds, they had completely eliminated the other group of Jaffa, before they turned towards Khonsu’s group.

To Teal’c’s surprise, the Jaffa around him holstered their weapons and moved out from their positions behind the buttresses. Khonsu came forward among them, his expression amused. “Your intervention is timely, Dol’ok of Mizhel. Do you have him?”

Dol’ok nodded and stepped aside to reveal a Jaffa who looked decidedly uncomfortable in his armour. The Jaffa around him bore smirks and grins at his discomfort, but the expression which came over the familiar face upon seeing Teal’c was one of pure relief, even if restrained by his military bearing.

“Colonel,” he said, nodding at O’Neill. “Teal’c.”

O’Neill paused in dusting himself off as he caught sight of the man. “Adamson!”

Indeed, it was Colonel Adamson.

*

Things were happening way too fast for Jack to keep up with them.

First, there was the arrival of Boch and being shot by him. Jack was just a bit annoyed by that; being shot never put him in the best of moods. Then he woke up to find Carter and Daniel gone with Boch. He was definitely irritated with that - both with Boch for taking them, and his team-mates for being taken.

Being dragged out of the cells by Khonsu and his travelling circus of tame Jaffa was no joy, and fretting over Carter and Daniel and why Boch had taken them away was no fun either. The worst thing was that Jack couldn't demand to know where they'd gone, not without breaking Khonsu's cover. And, while Jack didn't entirely trust the Tok'ra, and certainly wasn't all that sure that this guy really was one, he knew about covers and how you left them intact - especially when you didn't have any other weapons.

Then there was the firefight. Lovely place to be - with or without weapons. Jack made for the floor and squirmed his way over to the wall. Prisoner he might be, but he had no intention of becoming deadweight. That firefight ended and another one began, and when _that_ one had finished, Adamson walked out from among a party of Jaffa.

Jack was caught by surprise as the Jaffa-dressed Lieutenant Colonel addressed him. It was such an outlandish outfit that it took Jack a second to recognise him.

“Adamson!”

He took a quick stocktake. The man was thinner than he’d been, burned down to the mere flesh, muscle, and bone of his being. There was no doubt the last two months had been difficult, and, judging by the slightly haggard look in his eyes, the road to full recovery would be slow.

“Colonel,” said the younger man. His eyes flashed beyond the Jaffa, looking for the person he knew must be there but wasn’t.

Jack couldn’t answer his question, not right now. Mostly, because Jack didn’t know the answer.

And there were other things - uncomfortable things - going on inside his chest at the sight of Carter’s fiancé.

“Khonsu, what the hell is going on here?” He paused as he realised that his objection could be taken quite the wrong way, “Not that I’m not glad to see you again, Adamson, just that we were here to get information, not pick up prisoners.”

Beneath their feet, explosions boomed, and the ship rocked again. Talk ceased as they attempted to retain their balance, waiting for the rocking to die down.

“That explosion was closer,” Teal’c stated.

“You have limited time, O’Neill,” Khonsu said, exchanging glances with the free Jaffa guy - Dol’ok.

“ _We_ have limited time,” Dol’ok said, interrupting Khonsu. “Herak’s supporters have made their way to the drives of the ship and are disabling them even now. My men believe they seek to destroy the ship itself.”

“To what purpose?”

“Destroying the free Jaffa in Khonsu’s service,” Dol’ok said simply, “Ending our lives and yours.”

“Can they be stopped?”

Dol’ok shook his head. “We have attempted to reach the drives. They have sealed off the passages so no warrior can pass.”

Teal’c spoke again, his measure speech cutting through the swiftly-delivered report. “A mothership is exceedingly stable when grounded on a pyramid base.”

“And yet we rock,” Jack said. He glanced around at the Jaffa standing in a loose circle around the quintet of Khonsu, Dol’ok, Teal’c, Adamson, and himself. “Where’s your nearest escape hatch?”

“I cannot run,” Khonsu said, a little angrily. “This ship - this planet - is my headquarters. Without it, I have little to commend myself among the System Lords.”

Exasperation coursed through Jack. “If this ship goes up with you trying to save it, you’ll have absolutely _nothing_ to commend you to the System Lords - or anyone else you’re trying to impress. Cut your losses and run for it.”

The man was hesitating, prudence warring with possession. The Tok’ra might not be fully Goa’uld in nature, but some Goa’uld characteristics, while muted, could not be entirely cowed - arrogance, possessiveness, secrecy, and distrust came to mind.

Jack opened his mouth to press his case, and something stuttered near Khonsu. Everyone turned to look as a small pin on his lapel made a soft noise. A moment later, it blared with a familiar voice.

“Aris Boch to Lord Khonsu. I have my cargo and am preparing for flight.”

 _Cargo_ , Jack thought, incredulously. _Carter and Daniel are considered cargo?_

“This is Lord Khonsu,” Khonsu said with considerable arrogance. “You will not reconsider assisting my Jaffa in stamping out this rebellion? The rewards would be considerable.”

He edged closer to Khonsu, the better to hear what was being said by the bounty hunter. The answer that came through the intercom was lazily amused. The sound of a man who had the items he came for and wasn’t going to overreach himself. “I don’t think so.”

“I can offer you nothing to make you reconsider?”

“Lord Khonsu, I see no point in being greedy. Dr. Jackson and Major Carter will fetch a more-than-adequate price for me.” From the corner of his eye, Jack saw Adamson’s expression harden and quickly made gestures to indicate that it was, in fact, okay. Even though Jack wasn’t sure of that himself, he was fairly certain that protesting at this point in time would only make things worse. “And you wished for the other two to be held in custody for Anubis.”

“Very well.” Khonsu told him. “The Jaffa monitoring space-bound flight have your authorisations. I wish you good fortune wherever you are bound.”

“Thank you, Lord Khonsu.” There was a pause in the conversation - a significant one. “I hear the planets along the Criosanna are particularly nice at this time of year.”

Khonsu blew out his breath in something approximating a laugh. “You would do better in the evergreen forests of Dienatos, bounty hunter. The red deer there run free beneath the three moons in early spring. Quite a challenge for a man of your skills.”

If that made sense to Boch, it sure didn’t to Jack. Red deer? Evergreen forests? “I’ll keep that in mind. Boch out.”

“So?” Jack demanded. “What’s going on?”

“Aris Boch has your team-mates. He will get them to a safe planet with a Stargate from which they may return to your planet.”

“And that whole business about the deer in the forest?”

Khonsu’s smile curved, beautiful and yet also slightly diabolical. “I worked with Jolinar of Malkshur many centuries ago. It is a code she knew. One that Major Carter should recognise. I reassured her that you were with us and that our escape would be made at the first available opportunity.”

“You wanna explain it?” Jack held up his hands. “Never mind. I want out of here.” He glanced around at the Jaffa watching the tableau and wondered which ones he could trust.

“You would have us abandon ship?”

He resisted the urge to shake his head at the guy. For a bunch of operatives who lived with their lives in danger every moment of the day, too often, it seemed like the Tok’ra were woefully unprepared for any kind of withdrawl when their cover was broken. No wonder they hadn’t gotten anywhere in the fight against the Goa’uld in the last two thousand years!

“What I would like to do is _live_ ,” Jack told Khonsu dryly. “Staying on a ship where the rebel Jaffa have got control of the drive rooms - drives which Carter tells me include naquadah - is not among ‘scenarios likely to keep you alive’ on Earth.”

“And what, then, do you propose to do?” Khonsu demanded.

“It’s a mothership,” Jack said, a little exasperated. “It’ll have glider bays.”

“Gliders do not have interstellar travel capabilities, O’Neill.”

“But it’ll get us out of the ship. Then we can put down and head for the Stargate. Khonsu can gather up his troops and shoot the ones that don’t believe he’s a loyal Goa’uld, we’re all happy.”

Khonsu coughed. “There is no Stargate on this planet.”

Oh. There went one set of plans, straight down the gurgler.

“There are nearby solar systems with planets containing Stargates, however this base was intended to be a private one that could not be breached with a Stargate.”

“And that screws us quite nicely.”

“As a matter of fact, Colonel,” Dol’ok said, a hint of smugness in his voice, “These gliders have been...modified.”

“Modified?”

“To include engines capable of interstellar travel.”

Jack blinked. The Goa’uld had never before tried fiddling around with what they already had - they were thieves, not innovators. “Why?” He held up his hands. “Forget I asked, I don’t want to know right now.” He’d been around Carter and Daniel far too long, asking questions that probably wouldn’t be answered in any time he cared to get them. And Jack suspected he wouldn’t like the answer either, although that wasn’t a reason not to hear the Jaffa out.

Khonsu looked to Dol’ok. “Your men?”

Dol’ok looked around at his Jaffa. “It is not in the nature of the Jaffa to run from battle.”

“You can’t topple the Goa’uld if you’re dead,” Adamson spoke up.

Another explosion shook the mothership. This one was closer, and Jack shot a glance at Teal’c, who was staring up at the ceiling in a pose of alert awareness. The dark eyes tracked towards him as the mothership shuddered twice more in quick succession, and when their gazes met, Jack knew that Teal’c didn’t trust the integrity of the mothership much longer. “Okay, look, you guys can argue this until the cows come home. Whether or not you guys are coming - we’re going.” Jack jerked his head at Adamson, “Adamson.”

He started off down the cross-corridor, only to be called back by Teal’c. “O’Neill.”

“Teal’c, we’re going.”

“The glider bay is not in that direction, O’Neill.”

Jack spun on his heel, glaring at his team-mate. He ignored the smirks of the Jaffa around him, and the cough Khonsu covered. He didn’t meet Adamson’s slightly amused gaze, and indicated the corridor they’d been walking down. “This one?”

The dramatic effect was spoiled, but it was still tactically effective. After one turn around the corridor, Jack found himself again in the middle of a platoon of Jaffa. It made his shoulder blades itch, even if these were friendlies.

A sideways glance at Teal’c showed the big guy serene and implacable. He looked more like one of the Jaffa than a prisoner, although there was no doubt he was no longer ‘true Jaffa’ - not in the desert fatigues with Apophis’ gold brand on his forehead.

“How is she?” The question distracted him, turned his attention to the ‘Jaffa’ on the other side of him. Adamson looked back at him, knowing of whom to ask the question, subtly aware that Jack would have ‘looked after’ Carter in his absence.

Jack wondered what the other man would do if told about the kiss.

“She’s been worried about you,” he said quietly as they marched down the corridor. He didn’t look at the other man, largely because he wanted to give at least the superficial appearance of being a prisoner, but also because he feared that to look at Adamson might give away what Jack was hiding. “McKenzie’s been shrinking her so she’s been off-duty. This was supposed to be her first off-world mission back.”

There wasn’t much else Adamson could ask. Nothing else that Jack should know about Carter.

But he did.

“Do you believe Khonsu’s telling the truth? That Sam’s okay with Boch?”

Jack thought about it. “I want to believe.”

He got a wary glance from Adamson for that and smiled in spite of himself.

“What?” It didn’t seem as though Adamson was in much of a mood for amusement. Separated too long from other humans, a prisoner of the Goa’uld for over two months. There’d be therapy for Adamson before he was allowed back on active gating status.

Lots of it.

“Nothing,” Jack temporised.

“What happened?”

“After the wormhole closed on me, you mean?” The bitterness was like acid, dripping unexpectedly from the other man’s voice.

“They thought you were through,” Jack said quietly. It was the only sop he could offer him; an honest mistake that would in no way make up for whatever Adamson had suffered these last eight weeks - no matter how ‘together’ the guy appeared.

“They thought wrong,” Adamson said quietly, and now there was no bitterness, just resignation. “The Aegeptans hauled me up, talked about putting a snake in my head.” The shiver ran over his body and Jack automatically shivered in response. He’d nearly been there, nearly had that with Hathor’s little friend several years ago. Sometimes he swore he could still feel the thing moving around at the base of his skull...

The Jaffa leading them turned down a corridor. “Why didn’t they?” Jack asked, following them.

There was a marked pause. A moment when the other man hesitated between telling the truth and telling the white lie. “I guess I was more valuable handed over to the System Lords as payment,” Adamson muttered at last. “I don’t know why.”

Jack could hear the lie. The quaver of uncertainty in the stiff voice. Things had happened to Adamson as a prisoner of the Goa’uld - bad things. Things he’d carefully suppressed to retain his sanity, and would continue to suppress until it burst from him in a sudden undamming.

A sudden thought intruded, _Let Carter not get swept away when the barriers break._ She had enough to deal with in her life, her own stresses and worries - and guilt, his conscience reminded him - without having to deal with her fiancé’s personal demons.

And yet...wasn’t that what happened when you agreed to marry someone? You agreed to take on, not only their triumphs but their terrors as well, to hold them when the demons came, and to lift them up when the angels did. And Carter had agreed to marry Adamson - for better and worse, as the vows went.

Jack felt physically sick at the thought. Then he was uncomfortable with the strength of his reactions. It reminded him too clearly of wounds that weren’t quite fully healed.

To that end, Jack did what he always did when things got a little hot under the collar. He changed the topic.

“Did you see anything?” Tactical stuff, Jack meant.

Adamson understood. “Some stuff. I don’t know how much meaning it has. Teal’c or Dr. Jackson would be able to make more sense of it.”

He paused, and, beneath the talk, Jack could almost hear the thin, reedy thread of personal fear winding itself around Adamson. _After everything I’ve been through, could she still want me?_

Jack knew the feeling. He’d been there, he’d done that. He’d bought the t-shirt, and it sat on a hanger in his closet of repression. Of course, the name on the t-shirt was Sara’s, but that had been a long time ago. But he couldn’t say anything to Adamson. Not right now. It wasn’t the time or the place, and Adamson probably didn’t want to hear anything from Jack.

Besides, if Jack was honest with himself, he didn’t want to be reassuring Adamson that Carter would want him back after everything that had happened to him. There were some things his heart wasn’t quite big enough to manage, and pushing her into the arms of another man - even a man she’d chosen - was one of them.

He kept walking, one foot in front of the other. Another corridor, another turn. Another corridor, another turn. A platoon of Jaffa running towards them, staff weapons raised and crackling with energy. Jack hit the floor in pure self-preservation, even as he saw the running Jaffa stop and brace themselves to begin firing.

The sound and energy of the fight ricocheted over him, past him, beyond him, searing blasts and thin spikes of energy. His hair crackled from the static. There were cries and yells, and the sound of more footsteps running. And when the dust cleared, the other Jaffa were down, but so, too, were several Jaffa who’d been on their side.

Jack hauled himself to his feet, accepting Teal’c’s hand up but paused as a series of explosions sounded. “What’s that?”

Dol’ok bent down over one of his dead Jaffa, and looked up, expression weary. “The sabotage of the drives appears to have set off a chain reaction in the naquadriah powercells. This reaction has spread to several other key systems on the mothership...”

“Which, when translated into simple terms, means...?” Jack had no time for deciphering anything at this moment. His senses were increasingly screaming at him to get off the ship.

“If we do not leave this ship within a matter of minutes, O’Neill, we shall be caught up in the destruction of the mothership.”

Wonderful things, instincts.

“The glider hangar is this way,” Khonsu said, giving up all pretense of playing the Goa’uld. “I fear we have little time left...”

A corridor later and they were at the door. A code later and they were in the hangar. A radio signal later, and the hangar bay door opened.

There was no blackness of space beyond, only the blue of the planetary sky on which the mothership was landed. Beyond it, invisible, was the trillions of miles of space, representing freedom.

The Jaffa had already jogged themselves to their gliders, pairing up and climbing in with an impossible agility. Jack felt old and sore just watching them. He turned to Teal’c. “Take Adamson. He’s never flown one of these before.”

Teal’c inclined his head, and Adamson paused, “Colonel...”

“Now is not the time to argue,” Jack snapped. “Go!” And he made for the nearest unoccupied glider, seeing Khonsu do the same.

The start-up procedures were simple. Amazing how easy the basics were no matter the craft. Power-up, nav systems on, life-support systems on, engines running hot, green light for go.

“O’Neill,” Teal’c said over the intercom. “We are ready.”

“Big thumbs up, T,” Jack told him. “Reach for the sky.”

“There are no cowboys here, O’Neill.”

“Oh, you could always do the ‘yee-haw’ thing like Hammond, you know,” Jack said lightly.

Teal’c’s voice was drier than the Gobi desert. “I believe I shall refrain.”

Jack grinned, but didn’t say anything more than, “You lead, I’ll be right on your tail.”

“Very well, O’Neill.”

Across the hangar bay, in the other cockpit, he glimpsed Adamson yanking off the skull-cap that had been covering his hair and ruffling his hair up with the air of a man relieved to be getting out of a tense situation.

He watched as Teal’c and Adamson’s glider slowly lifted off the ground, as gracefully as a bird balancing on a single leg. In his mind, he saw Teal’c’s movements as he increased the propulsion against gravity, adjusted the responsiveness of the controls, took the yoke in his hand, and began directing the glider out of the bay.

In his mind, he could hear Carter’s explanation of just how the gliders worked in atmosphere. He didn’t understand a bar of it, but she did, and he trusted her. For a moment, he wished she was here for him to talk to.

That thought died as the engines sputtered at forty percent and refused to give any more power.

Jack frowned and checked the controls. The lights were all green, signalling that everything was good. But there was no denying the diagnostics - nor the low grumble in the body of the glider. The engines didn’t have enough power to get him off the ground.

Bitterness and frustration was suddenly sharp in his mouth. He had a glider, oh yes, but it wasn’t working. It wouldn’t even get him off the ground, let alone permit him to reach escape velocity or hit a hyperspace window.

“O’Neill?” The voice was Khonsu’s, deep with harmonics and anxious. “You are not moving?”

“Oh, very observant.” Jack couldn’t help snapping at the Tok’ra. “Your glider is screwed. Engine power won’t go beyond forty percent. You need to get these things serviced more often, Khonsu.” He grimaced and took a moment to dump his head in his hands. This glider wasn’t going anywhere - not even out that bay door. “How long before this thing blows?”

There was a pause of a few seconds - long enough for another explosion to sound. “There are no other gliders that you will be able to reach in time, O’Neill.” Khonsu said at last.

“Got space in your glider?”

“Yes, but...”

“Then you have a passenger.”

“But the integrity of my cover...”

“Khonsu, I’m sure the integrity of your cover means more to you than my life, but my life means more to me than the integrity of your cover right now. We’ll work something out - I’ll hold you hostage or something...” Even as Jack spoke, he shut the systems down and unlocked the cockpit.

With a touch of bitterness, he noticed all the other gliders appeared to be working fine. They were hovering, although, even as he looked, he saw the first one launch itself skywards, heading for space.

As he reached the floor of the hangar, explosions sounded, louder and closer than ever. The ship shook, rocking harder than ever and making his trip to the next glider station more difficult than expected.

He climbed into the back cockpit, behind Khonsu. The Tok’ra’s expression was displeased. “I do not like this...”

“You don’t have to like it,” Jack snapped, a little nettled as he settled himself down into the seat and began strapping on harness and mouthpiece. “You just have to accept it. What’s our status?”

“Might I remind you that I have been flying such craft for thousands of years before you were born, Colonel?”

“You may. But I’m still going to ask what our status is.” Jack watched as the gliders holding the Jaffa launched, one by one.

Then it was their turn.

Even as they hovered, Jack felt the final explosion that signalled the death of the mothership. As they pointed their nose to the sky, he saw the walls of the hangar collapse beneath the onslaught of the fireball. “Punch it!” The yelp was instinctive, and Khonsu reacted instinctively, without understanding the phrase.

The air around them incandesced. They accelerated. And suddenly instead of the orange and black patterns of fire outside his window, Jack saw blue sky and green hills, lit by the flaming explosion that had swept up the mothership behind them. They flickered, scorched by the passion and fury of the fire at losing the tiny gliders arrowing swiftly out of its reach.

Jack remembered to breathe.

“We are full power and space-worthy,” Khonsu informed him as they soared up and up and up. “Although this is a very difficult situation...”

Outside the glider, the sky was darkening. Pale blue turned to deep blue, which turned to midnight blue, which turned to the deep blackness of space.

“Look,” Jack told him, “We’ll work something out. We head out of the system to somewhere with a Stargate. You drop me off, and go back to the Goa’uld with a sob story...” He paused as the curve of the planet dropped away, and the empty vacuum of space revealed something else.

A mothership.

“Expecting company?” He managed to ask Khonsu.

“I was not.” Khonsu sounded grim.

“So...not friendly.”

“I doubt it.”

A Goa’uld mothership.

Even from this distance, they could see the specks launching themselves from the hangar bay.

Jack checked out the screens and the space above his head to work out where Teal’c and Adamson were. He could see no sign of the gliders that had launched before themm probably because the star-speckled sky was full of gliders and there was no way of comprehending which one was which.

The comms system burped. “Sierra Gulf One, please confirm exit vector.”

The voice was military, clipped, waiting for an answer. For all the emotion in it, it might have been a bored tech sitting in a tower, giving authorisation for a flyby.

Jack tapped his mouthpiece. “Sierra Gulf One-Four, I am on the way out with my catch.” He didn’t dare mention names, not with every glider privy to this conversation. As far as Jack knew, there was no ‘privacy’ channel in Goa’uld communications. What was for the ears of one was for the ears of all when it came to combat matters. “Head for meeting point zero-zero-four-two-zero-one. Will rendesvous there. Copy?”

“Copy that.”

A moment later, a tiny speck arced out amidst the milling gliders, bouncing along like a bee on a mission for some nectar. A good seven or eight gliders chased it, but the pilot was skilled enough to keep any bolts from impacting.

Jack watched, waiting to see it jump to hyperspace...

Then the comms channel crackled and, a moment later, the announcement came. “ _Kree tal shal mak!_ ”

“You’re sure you’re not expecting company?” Jack asked, sardonically. He glanced up at the huge ship, and felt the familiar thrill of excitement and fear.

“He was due insystem within a few days to ‘collect’ your friend. However, your friend was delivered early.”

“Do you mind not talking about him like he’s some kind of parcel?” It was a given that Jack wasn’t overly-fond of Adamson. On some levels, Adamson’s engagement to Carter had made things uncomfortable between the two men. However, Adamson was one of Jack’s people, and that overrode any petty personal issues. Duty before feelings.

“It is a convenience,” Khonsu replied, serenely.

“ _Kree, setak meta kal lekt!_ ”

“And that meant...?”

“Identify yourselves or be fired upon.”

“And what are we going to do?”

The Tok’ra exhaled, a little irritated. He leaned forward and began flipping switches and turning dials. “You wish to remain free which means running, and I wish to retain my role which means capture.”

When put like that...

“It is within possibility that I may return to the System Lords at a later stage with a tale of how I escaped the Tau’ri with great skill and daring,” Was there a hint of sarcasm in Khonsu’s voice before he continued? “However, once you are captured by Ba’al, there will be no escape for you.”

“Cheerful,” Jack observed, “So we’re running?”

He saw the first blaze of fire wash over their starboard wing, narrowly missing the tip. “Yes.” Khonsu already had the yoke in his hands. “I would hold on,” he advised.

Jack was about to retort that there weren’t exactly any things on which to hold, when the glider dropped. In an F-18, the gees involved in such a movement would have pressed Jack against the straps holding him into place. He couldn’t help the automatic comparison to Earth technology. It was an instinctive reaction, and one that he had every time he stood on the bridge of an alien ship.

They manuevred with a skill that left Jack speechless with admiration. He gathered that Khonsu had had quite a bit of practise at this, Tok’ra spy or no Tok’ra spy. They jinked and dived and swooped and fired and generally eluded the dozen or so gliders that were on their tail.

“Need me to do anything?” He called from the back.

“Not necessary, Colonel,” Khonsu said. “Since we are preserving the fiction that you are in here and I am your prisoner, it would be best if you do not man the guns.” They continued to jink and turn, avoiding Ba’al’s gliders with reckless skill and speed. “However, I cannot keep this up forever. We will shortly be in range of the mothership’s weapons systems. I recommend that you begin calculating a hyperspace window for our departure from this system.”

Jack pulled up the program from the computer bank in front of him. “You know,” he said as he entered in co-ordinates, “If you ever get tired of spying, you might like to come to Earth and teach a couple of our academy graduates some of these moves.”

A harsh bark came from the man in front, and the head turned enough so that Jack was fixed with an amused blue eye. “Jacob, host of Selmak, tells me that your space program is not sufficiently advanced as to have craft capable of such manuevres.”

“Well...”

“He has conveyed to you our dislike of your ‘meddling’ with Goa’uld technology.” They curved around in a loop, firing at the oncoming gliders.

“Hey, we’re just using what comes to hand...” Jack protested as he selected a likely system. One to which they could hop out, take a breather, and take stock of their situation, before heading back to the rendesvous point.

Fire painted their portside viewscreen, Jack glanced up, then looked back down to the navcomp. “You are playing with fire,” Khonsu said, quite determinedly. “Children playing at being adults.”

“Nobody’s playing, okay?” Jack snapped back, nettled. “We have a world and it’s the only one we know. We’re in this as much as you guys. We just have a different _modus operandi_.”

There was a pause, “I do not know what this ‘ _modus operandi_ ’ is. However,” and the glider slewed around, firing back at their opponents. “If you do not have a jump solution ready soon, then you will have no opportunity to either explain the term or justify your race’s choices.”

Jack bit back his retort as the nav computer accepted the hyperspace jump he’d given it. “Course is set. Soon as you like, we’re out of here.”

“Your friends?”

He hit the open comms button. “Sierra Gulf One Four, are you still out there?” Silence. Jack hoped that meant Teal’c and Adamson had gotten away. “Sierra Gulf One Four, please respond?” He swore silently and shut off the comms. “If they’re gone, they’re gone.”

“And if they are not?”

Jack didn’t answer. If they weren’t, then it was already too late for them. They were either gone or space junk.

He really hoped they were gone.

“Are we ready to go?”

“We are.”

Jack refused to think of Teal’c and Adamson as anything _but_ safe. Adamson particularly. Carter needed him back. The thought ached, but he spared no space for it. She’d chosen Adamson, and Adamson was a good man. Jack wasn’t going to be a lump and stand in their way. He’d hoped, and he’d loved, and he’d lost.

Sometimes that was just the way the cookie crumbled.

He realised that, in front of him, Khonsu was waiting for him to get them out of the gliders converging on their position.

“Jumping to hyperspace... _now_.” And he reached out to activate the hyperdrive.

The glider shuddered as he pulled down the lever.

Shit.

They were going nowhere. Fast.

*

Hope was a fragile thing, a web spanning two branches. It was fine and delicate and nearly invisible except when you looked at it from the right angle, and then it sprang into fine focus.

On the fourth moon of Faran III, Sam emerged from the hut and glared up at the cloudy grey sky and kicked at the rich black loam beneath her feet.

The moon was a fertile place. Volcanic activity had long ago enriched the soil, making it an excellent place for agricultural development. The people who lived on the moon tilled the ground with ploughs using beasts that looked like a cross between a horse and a kangaroo. Daniel was already entranced with the culture, and had developed a crude sign-language with the natives.

They’d been here nearly twelve hours, waiting for a signal from Khonsu. Nothing yet.

“Why here?” She asked Boch, who sat, incongruous amidst the plethora of leathergoods and rattan furniture. “Why meet here?”

Boch accepted a platter of some kind of fish from an elderly woman and sat it down in his lap. “Because it’s known to Khonsu and myself, but not to the Goa’uld.” He indicated the platter as he speared a chunk of flesh and began chewing. “It’s inhabited, which means we have supplies, and there are enough lifeforms and low-grade naquadah for us not to come up on any scans that might be set.” He shrugged. “And we can stay here for several days. The Goa’uld don’t usually come through this sector of space. There are other, richer pickings elsewhere.” The bright blue eyes regarded her mockingly, “Something wrong, Major?”

Sam wanted to retort that there were plenty of things wrong. The first and foremost was that they hadn’t seen or heard a thing from Colonel O’Neill and Teal’c, let alone Khonsu, since they’d followed Aris Boch off the ship - a move that Sam was even now regretting. They should have stuck by their downed team-mates and taken their chances. _Nobody gets left behind._

Of course, a practical little voice pointed out, if they’d taken their chances and stayed with their team-mates, they’d probably never have escaped at all.

She held her tongue, though, and hiked up to the edge of the hill to view the ridges of volcanic mountains that crested beyond the bowl of the valley in which they were hiding.

Twelve hours.

There was a rustle of grass on the slope behind, and a soft, attention-getting cough. A moment later, Daniel appeared alongside her and tucked his hands into his jacket pockets. “You okay?”

She managed half a smile and stared back out at the sky again. “Just worried.”

“They’ll make it,” he said, reassurance for himself as well as her.

“I know,” she replied.

Of course, she didn’t, and neither did he. But they told themselves they did and it sufficed.

“I...ah...” Daniel sounded unusually hesitant, and Sam glanced at him. He had the kind of expression that usually meant some kind of a confession was forthcoming.

“Daniel?”

He pulled off his glasses and began polishing them. “I...ah...think I’ve worked out the third person Khonsu was supposed to be extracting.”

Sam turned, interested again. Boch had refused to answer their inquiries regarding the ‘third deer’ Khonsu had mentioned. “Who?”

One corner of his mouth tilted upwards, “Why were we going to see Khonsu in the first place?”

Her eyes widened and hope suddenly tangled in her throat. “Grant?”

“I think so,” Daniel said. He held up a hand, warning her against hoping too soon. “I don’t know, and I doubt Boch is going to tell us. But...it makes sense.”

And it did.

But Daniel was still squirming, and Sam gave him a glance out of the corner of her eyes, wondering what was at him.

“What?” She asked at last, seeing as he wasn’t about to disclose what was causing him such discomfort about the news.

“If they didn’t make it...” he paused. “I was just going to suggest that you don’t...”

“...get my hopes up?” Sam asked, not a little dryly. It was odd for Daniel to try to bring her down about something. More often it was he who was the enthusiastic one having to be reined in by his team-mates. She huffed a big sigh. “I won’t.”

He looked at her, as if uncertain if she was telling the truth. She smiled at him, trying to assauge his fears. But in those few minutes, she felt the webs of hope swiftly woven in the dark corners of her mind, buoying her spirits.

It was hard _not_ to hope.

Daniel fitted his glasses back on and stared up at the sky. “Sam?” His hand reached out to touch her arm, and she turned back to the cloudy grey sky.

The cloudy grey sky with two dark specks soaring in from space.

“Do we need to get out of sight?” Daniel asked as she caught her breath.

“I don’t see why,” Sam said, squinting up at the sky as the specks became tiny winged craft, and the craft became identifiable as gliders.

Two of them. Flying in tandem. Side by side.

Back to her.

She grinned, suddenly feeling giddy - like a child let out to play after weeks of being cooped up inside with an illness. “Come on,” she said, turning and heading back down the slope. “We’ll check with Boch...”

If Daniel was surprised at her sudden ebullience, he seemed willing enough to join her in it. In spite of his own warning, he was susceptible to the pull of enthusiasm and possibility. “What’s to check?”

“I don’t know,” Sam admitted, and saw him look at her, surprised. “What?”

His mouth twisted a little in wry humour, but he didn’t do anything beyond shaking his head and following her back down to the village nestled in the bowl of the valley.

“Incoming!” Sam called to Boch where he sat.

“I know,” he said, bluntly, still eating from the platter the old woman had given him. “Scanners picked them up when they first entered the system.”

“And you didn’t think to tell us?” The outrage belonged to both of them, but the words were Daniel’s.

Boch shrugged, “You didn’t ask.” He clambered to his feet, bulky and muscular, but very lithe. He was still dependant on the _roshna_ , or so Sam presumed after she’d uncovered a stash of the drug in the cargo bay while they were in transit, but seemingly less so than before. “But let’s go see who’s come to visit,” he said.

The gliders had put down some way away, settling on what looked like weedy ground. The first glider cockpit opened and Teal’c and an unknown Jaffa clambered out. Beyond them, the second glider’s cockpit remained down, but Sam glimpsed the glint of a silvered head in the back seat.

As they halted at the edge of the field, she looked back at the Jaffa who’d flown with Teal’c. Her heart jumped. His gait was achingly familiar - the slight hitch to his pace that she’d found as distinctive as the Colonel’s brisk gait, or Daniel’s absent-minded amble, or Teal’c’s deliberate stride.

 _Grant_.

Even as she watched, he hesitated. Across the distance between them, she saw the relief and fear warring across his expression. Then he lifted his chin and came to meet her, trusting in the impending vows she’d promised him: _in sickness and in health..._

Not the same man she’d walked through the Stargate with over two months ago. Not quite. But still there.

And she felt a rush of joy and overwhelming relief as she went to him and hugged him without words. His hand lightly clasped the back of her neck, even as his arm went around her waist, and she heard the sob of relief that he gave and turned her head into his shoulder so she wouldn’t shame herself with an answering sob.

She had Grant back.

There were shadows in his eyes, and she pulled back, the better to study his face. Inside, she didn’t really want to see what imprisonment by the Goa’uld had done to him, but she knew she needed to face it. She needed to face him. Grant would need her to face it. If not now, then very soon as he rehabilitated from the experience.

Best to get it over with.

There were the signs of pain and suffering he’d undergone; the indeliable results of unthinkable cruelty and mind-shattering torture. The toll on his psyche was high and the cost to heal it would be time and a lot of care. It would be a long road back to stability for him, but Sam would be there for him however she could.

She would always be torn between her loyalty to Colonel O’Neill and her love for Grant. She would discharge her duties to both, but neither would ever have all of her, and they would all have to live with that. But each of them was worth what effort she would spend to balance between them. They were worth all that and more in her eyes.

“God, I missed you,” he muttered, his voice hoarse with emotion.

Sam just smiled tremulously in return, drinking in the sight of him.

There were no kisses. Not now. They were both too self-possessed, too aware of their audience to make a spectacle of themselves any more than they already had.

So she turned away, giving him space - giving herself space.

And realised that she didn’t recognise the two men who were climbing from the second glider.

Where is he?

Grant’s hand touched hers, and she gripped it, but didn’t turn back to him. Not yet. Instead, she turned to Teal’c who was consulting quietly with Daniel and Boch.

“Teal’c?” Sam asked. Coldness gripped her body as he turned towards her.

Grim regret twisted his mouth as he said five words that shattered the brief burst of relief. “I am sorry, Samantha Carter.”

She was dizzy for only a moment, her hand tightening around Grant’s calloused fingers. A glance back at Grant told her what she needed to know; loss, guilt, regret...

Her breath caught in her throat, and there were steel bands across her lungs.

Colonel...

*

Jack woke. Cold.

Freezing, in fact.

The ceiling above him was lost in soft misty gold, and as his sight cleared, he saw...

A canopy. White-gold silk draperies over his head like a four-poster. But not quite. There was a soft mattress beneath his body and as he turned his head, he felt the soft plumpness of the pillows under his head. He hissed in pain, and raised a hand to his head. Moving was a bad idea right now. He had a hangover worse than any he’d had before, and he didn’t remember how he’d come to be here...

Then he did. It all came flooding back to him.

 _“They will capture us,” Khonsu said with certainty._

 _“Can we have some positivity here?” Jack demanded, looking over the gyroscopes and indicators_

 _“I am looking at the situation realistically,” Khonsu said. “There is nowhere for us to go. We have two choices. Fight to the death...”_

 _“Not an option I like.”_

 _“... or surrender.”_

 _“Nope, don’t like that one either.” Damn Tok’ra and their fatalist policies._

 _Khonsu continued, doggedly. “We must make contingency plans, O’Neill. There are only two reasons a minor Goa’uld Lord would get into a glider with a known enemy of the Goa’uld.”_

 _“Yeah, yeah, traitor to the Goa’uld. What’s the other?”_

 _“The enemy forced him and was holding him hostage.”_

 _“You want them to believe that I took you hostage?” Those fighters were getting awfully close._

 _The hailing call sounded, and a rough voice grated through the comm system. “_ Verak ya’shak kree! _”_

 _Jack was about to tell the voice to shove it, when Khonsu spoke. “I am sorry for this, Colonel.” The Tok’ra actually sounded apologetic. Amazing._

 _He saw the muzzle of the weapon raise over the seat in front, and felt the cold, cold fear spread from his belly through his body long before he felt the shot hit him with fiery numbness._

 _A moment of brief, awful agony..._

 _Then he knew nothing._

Jack glanced around him.

He was in a room, richly furnished in an ancient-times kind of way. Daniel would have known exactly what era - if any - this place was décor’d in; Daniel wasn’t here. It wasn’t quite Egyptian, but it was close. Coloured frescoes, sand-coloured walls, weird shaped chairs with bright cushions on them, and the drape of fine material.

So Khonsu’s solution seemed to have worked...in a way. Although what he was doing in this suite of rooms instead of in a prison was questionable.

Something wasn’t quite right.

Everything after Khonsu shot him was a blur. Jack remembered bits and pieces. Fragments of a dream - or a nightmare. Being hauled out of the glider, dizzy and dozy. Stumbling along a corridor, barely able to keep up with the pace of the Jaffa. A handsome man with cold, dead eyes looking him over. A voice of deep and ugly harmonics pronouncing his fate.

Why the bed? Why the comfort? Why the headache?

Teal’c and Adamson had made it away. Of that much, Jack was sure.

Of that much, Jack was glad.

Carter... He let his thoughts dwell on her for just a moment. She had Adamson back again. They’d managed even more than what they’d set out to do. He gasped once, letting the regret out, squashing the little voice that suggested that without Adamson, maybe Carter might have turned to him. Maybe.

 _Not likely._ Not that way. _Not Carter._ It brought a deep ache to his chest, burrowing into his ribcage, shortening his breath.

Again, he bottled the pain up inside, locked it away and tossed away the key. He didn’t have time to be maudlin now. He had to work out where he was, what he was doing here, and how the hell to get away.

They hadn’t even restrained him. Jack rolled over, swinging his legs off the bed prepatory to standing up and exploring his surroundings. As he braced his hands against the bed, he felt something stir in his mind.

 _Colonel O’Neill of SG-1, I presume?_

Jack froze, even as he felt his body start to tremble in shocked reaction. His heart pounded, and his stomach twisted brutally in nauseating response. He had no saliva in his mouth, and no strength in his body. He wanted to be sick with every cell of his body.

He remembered this feeling from before. Brief and painful, but remembered nevertheless.

Hated.

 _No. Not this. Not THIS..._

Abruptly the trembling stilled, and a hand rubbed over his eyes and through his hair. _His_ hand rubbed over his eyes and through his hair, independent of his control.

And there was a voice in his head, raping his mind.

 _I am sorry, Colonel. We had no choice._

And yet...

 _Who are you?_ He thought at the thing inside him. The hated thing that _was_ him.

He felt the creature’s quiet regret at his revulsion as the answer came back.

 _I am Kanan of the Tok’ra._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And from this point, all bets are off! I started 'Waving and Drowning' in 2003 and wrote 'A Life For A Life' in 2005. A year or so later, I got into Stargate Atlantis and never wrote the third installment in the series. My apologies for leaving you hanging.


End file.
